Creating a game schedule with PHP _ Harder than I thought

Answer 1

You could build a array with each "game" in it so it is sth like

0 => 30 v 35
1 => 31 v 34
2 => 32 v 33

That should be quite easy. Then you just go through this array and put the game in the first row where none of the teams is already playing. There might be better and faster solutions but this is the first that came to my mind and i think its quite simple to write.

Answer 2

I don't have a straight answer, but it looks like you might need a little bit of graph theory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_%28graph_theory%29

Answer 3

Maybe this code solve your problem, it is not as elegant as it could be but it seems to work. You should know ho arrangeGames works ;)

Maybe you need to pay attention on arrangePlayerforDays. It put the various games in a day only if both of the players don't have a game already scheduled on that day. The other function are just for make the code more readable (and cover a pair of glitches in arrangePlayerforDays)

function gamePrettyPrint($gamesOnADay, $glue) {
  $result=array();
  foreach ($gamesOnADay as $currentGame) 
   $result[]=join($glue,$currentGame);
  return $result;
}

function arrangeGamesOnAday($day) {
  $result=array();
  for ($k=0, $limit=count($day); $k<$limit; $k+=2)
   $result[]=array($day[$k+1], $day[$k]);
  return $result;
}

function arrangeGames($players) { 
  for ($i=0, $limit=count($players); $i < $limit; $i++) 
    for ($j=$i+1; $j<$limit;$j++) 
      $games[]=array($players[$i], $players[$j]);
  return $games;
}

function calculateTournamentDuration($players) {
  return  count($players)-1; // (n!)/(2!*(n-2)!) * (1/n)
}

function arrangePlayerforDays($games, $days) {
  $mem = array_pad(array(),$tournamentDays,array());
  for ($k=0;count($games);$k++)
    if ((array_search($games[0][0],$mem[$k%$days])=== false)  and
        (array_search($games[0][1],$mem[$k%$days])=== false))
      list($mem[$k%$days][], $mem[$k%$days][]) = array_shift($games);
  return ($mem);
}

function scatterGamesOnCalendar($games, $tournamentDays) {
  $days=arrangePlayerforDays($games, $tournamentDays);
  $calendar=array_map('arrangeGamesOnAday',$days);
  return $calendar;
}

//  $initialArray = array('a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h');
$initialArray = array(30,31,32,33,34,35);

$games= arrangeGames($initialArray);
$tournamentSpan = calculateTournamentDuration($initialArray);
$calendar = scatterGamesOnCalendar($games, $tournamentSpan);

while ($day=array_shift($calendar))
  $prettyCalendar[]=gamePrettyPrint($day,' v ');

print_r($prettyCalendar);

Answer 4

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