new guy

[cjukes]

hi everybody. i  got this linkd through a newsletter i received in techrepublic newsltetter about  some greate open source educational software. fet was one of the programmes  which was mentioned. it just so happens i  work for a cpmapny which deals in educational solutions mostly.i had even been tasked a while back with developing a timetaboning solution for  some clients of ours .they are a  university.  well  vresion 1 of the solution went quite well.its just a simple timetabling program which  schedules lectures for students in particular courses  such that  it doesnt basically clash for the students,lectures and also there is no clash between venues .jsut the basic stuff.  it went quite well with  the algorithm being written in java .
it kinda sorts the larges classes first and then runs until it has sorted out  the rest of the classes.if there are some classes left which have to be sorted .they can be done manually.this is quite a simple expanation .i will go into details about it the next time i  post. it works but i get y the feeling my algorithm isnt  efficient enough when it comes to big resultsets .the algorithm is kind of a mix of brute  force searching along with  some methods to     make the search and allocation efficient. i mostly also used arraylists and a variant of hashmaps  to store the data so i could access it faster since most of the data is sotred in a a database.well this is the basics i can write about for now.the nex t  phase would probably be to use some sort of algorithm like simulated annealing,tabu searches ,etc or some heuristic pattering to swap the data until i get the best results.
i hope to learn a lot here since i am heavily interested in  applyng mathematical heuristic patterns   to my  application and to learn more
genrally about the usage of metaheuristis in apps.


i was wodering if anybody could give me a hint about  the general way in which the algorithm works.
its nice to be here and i hope to learn a lot

[Liviu Lalescu]

Did you read fet-x.x.x/doc/algorithm-explanation/algorithm.txt?

[cjukes]

Will go through it and get back to u.is there any way i   can hp.i am good in java.could help create some kind of generic mass importer of data into fet fmt. d ou have an irc channel

[Liviu Lalescu]

No, we don't have an irc channel.

Yes, you could write an importer, to be added as a separate program. Or maybe you could write your own interface, using the command line version of FET.