Phosphorus and Lime

I created the first version of my sonnetmonkey poetry project early last year but had to abandon it for other projects. Recently, I've had some time to revisit it and I'm in the process of building what I hope will come to be the definitive digital-monkeys-typing-poetry site on the web. Here's the first beta release:

sonnetmonkey beta

And here are some of the monkey's work:

sonnetmonkey manuscripts

My sister, an accountant, asked me if I could whip something up for her to help her crunch some numbers. Four months later...

What she wanted specifically was a program that could be given a set of numbers and a target amount and find the combination of numbers in the set that equals (or gets really close to) the target. I said surely there must be something in Excel that can do this for you. Apparently not. (Although I know now that I've finished someone will immediately point me to the Excel formula that does it.) So I came up with a ingenious brute force attack that could handle all of 16 or 17 numbers. Her sample set had 27.

It turns out this is a variation on a well-known and somewhat complex class of math problems: combinatorial optimization. A little further research led me to some strategies for pseudo-polynomial (as opposed to exponential) time algorithms (as an English major, I'm very proud to say that and say it every chance I get.) Eventually I put together something that seems to do the job.

Find the script here: klenwell.net

Here's the dataset my sister gave me:

373,643.70 27,232,550.00 7,820.80 113,089.00
10,250.00 13,919.75 30,763.08 83,165.38
46,572.53 7,500.00 2,000.00 263,912.00
1,056,367.56 275,892.42 3,000.00 60,486.01
248.24 165,513.08 4,708.25 200.00
1,427.28 300,000.00 400,000.00 178.77
151,802.82 210,250.00 266,700.00

Here's the target:

You can just copy and paste those in. I found the results surprising.