Computer Science | Grinnell College

At 11:00 on Wednesday, December 3, 2014, students in section 1 of CSC 207 will present their work on developing software that creates competition schedules for college athletic teams. Presentations will be in Science 3813.

At first glance, scheduling seems easy. In the standard form, each team must play every other team twice, once home and once away. But real scheduling is much more complicated. For example, some schools may be on a quarter system while others are on a semester system, so not every team can play on the same set of dates. Many teams also have severe restrictions on how far they can travel during weekdays. And when teams play multiple games on a weekend, they typically do all of those games at home or all of those games away. With enough of these kinds of restrictions, forming a schedule that meets all of the restrictions is impossible.

In a sequence of lightning presentations, student project teams will discuss their creative approaches to solving a concrete version of this problem and in generalizing those approaches.

Refreshments will be provided.