Re: Combinations & Permutations..... sort of

On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Horn, Jim <jim.horn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Maybe I am missing something but - isn't this just 2 to the 10th power ( -
1, because you have to choose something)? Doing it efficiently is another
thing.

Maybe you are missing the fact that Vern said exactly that:

<blockquote>
If you take out the one with 0, you have 2**n - 1
etc.

So by this, for 10 items, the total combinations is 2**10 - 1 = 1023.
</blockquote>

I tried presenting it in another form because Roger seemed to miss the
fact that Vern did account for "n choose k" over several values of k.
(Roger understood as far as "n choose k" for a single value of k.)

What do you do if multiple combinations match exactly?

I already asked that, and he already responded. His answer was that
he's going to take the first-found match, looking at oldest first. He
didn't say how he's defined "oldest" when comparing two sets of
invoices such as (A, D) versus (B, C), but I imagine it would just
depend on his algorithm. Whatever the algorithm finds first would be
what gets returned.

John Y.