Can't believe we're even discussing this. Had I come across this question before it was locked, I would have edited all the irrelevant rambling crap out of the post (as I often do) and left behind virtually nothing of substance:
How can I randomly select a person from a group of people?
I need to periodically select a person at random from a list of people, such that the same person isn't selected twice. I need to also insure that the selected person doesn't appear in a second list of people who are on vacation. Is there an algorithm for this?
And then I would have voted to close it as off topic, because it's completely useless. It's asking for an algorithm for something so unspecific that the only real answer is:
- Choose a person at random
- If the person is on the vacation list, go to step 1
- If the person was chosen last week, go to step 1
Why are we discussing this, and why did 100+ people upvote a question that is so obviously awful? It's utterly baffling to me that anybody is defending this question.
Further grievances:
He mentions that the solution may use a database, and may be some kind of script, and maybe it could even email people when chosen. WHAT? How is any of this relevant to us providing an algorithm? Is he looking for code? For a DB recommendation? For us to draw out his entire architecture?
He wants the algorithm to work for 10, but scale to fifty whole people people. If ever a question begged to be closed for lack of minimal understanding of the subject matter, this is it. "Scale". From 10 to 50. Because choosing from 1 to 50 is so much harder than choosing from 1 to 10. Has this person ever written a single line of code in their life?
The "difficult" part is that people might be absent, but with no groundwork for the language/database/whatever, this is completely irrelevant. As I've said above, literally the only response we can give to the "difficult" part of the question is to modify our algorithm with "Ok, don't choose an absent person".
