Balls and Baskets Problem Algorithm?

Question

Hello all,

Let's say there are N people and all these people have 1 basket and unlimited balls. They can throw a ball to others' baskets.

We let them throw their balls to others' baskets and we come up with a scenario like that :

'A' person's basket Balls from E, F, G, I, K, L, M, P

'B' person's basket Balls from A, C, E, F, K, T, R, Z

'C' person's basket Balls from ......

etc...

so I want to design an algorithm to find out which ones are friends. For example if A, C, D and E are friends they should throw their balls to each others' baskets. But at the same time they can throw some random stranger's basket too.

I know it is an optimization problem, there is not a spesific solution but I'm open to any idea to start over.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Friends will probably give each other a ball - there's a great starting point.

for x,y in people:
    if (x contains y && y contains x):
        x & y are friends.
    else:
        skip.

Rough pseudocode, write it in what you know.

That's only the beginning though, you should probably look at clusters of friends to weed out coincidences and add in forgotten friends.