Re: popularity contest and queso
On Sun, 11 Mar 2001, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> The simplest change would be to adjust the scripts so that editors starting
> with "jo" get a higher weight, but in order to be less obvious we need to
> invent something that sounds plausible but still does what we want.
>
> We could give smaller packages a higher preference even if they get fewer
> votes -- that is, we want to maximize the CD score, so really what we're
> interested in is the popularity of a package per kilobyte, not just the
> popularity.
Well, this is the the classic napsack problem. You have a cost and a
utility to every item, and you maximize the utility under a certain cost
constraint. So, even if joe may not be used much, if it is small
enough, that might not matter. This being a clasic CS problem and having
a solution, it might be interesting to see what one of the algorithms to
solve the napsack problem would put on a cd.
It is not about how one collects the data, it is how one interprets
it.
Andrew
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