Learn how to use decision trees to model just about any problem.
by Rod Stephens
June 28, 2007
uppose you and your swashbuckling buccaneer friends attack a Spanish galleon. When the smoke clears you find that you have emerged victorious but now you must begin the more difficult and dangerous task of dividing up the booty. If the division isn't reasonably fair, you'll face a mutiny that makes the original skirmish look like a tea party.
The "booty division problem" can be tricky if the treasure includes many discrete items with different values. Sharing 10,000 doubloons is relatively easy but dividing a chest of jewelry with assorted values evenly can be difficult. Fortunately, pirates aren't generally known for their math skills, so perhaps no one will notice that the shares aren't worth the same amount. In computer science, the "booty division problem" usually goes by the more prosaic name "partition problem."
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uppose you and your swashbuckling buccaneer friends attack a Spanish galleon. When the smoke clears you find that you have emerged victorious but now you must begin the more difficult and dangerous task of dividing up the booty. If the division isn't reasonably fair, you'll face a mutiny that makes the original skirmish look like a tea party.
