How does your club decide who swims what relays for local or championship meets? What criteria are used, and who organizes relays at meets? How are decisions made on what swimmers get to swim and what ones don't?
One of our swimmers developed a computer program to come up with the fastest relay for each age group. Then it is just a matter of convincing people to swim them.
It's a well known problem (unbalanced assignment problem) in Operations Research that can be solved by a number of algorithms. For a simple example, say a medley relay, you have four swimmers and estimates of their times for each stroke. One minimizes the overall time for the relay by picking the combination of the smallest sum of times. For more swimmers and missing data, the problem becomes slightly more complicated - but solvable in a reasonable amount of time.
Of course, such an algorithm does not take into account intangibles - such as good will, participation (giving everyone a chance to swim on a relay) and of course, the swimmer who swims much faster (slower) in a relay situation as opposed to an individual event.
It would be cool to create a program that optimizes a dual meet line up.
One of our swimmers developed a computer program to come up with the fastest relay for each age group. Then it is just a matter of convincing people to swim them.
It's a well known problem (unbalanced assignment problem) in Operations Research that can be solved by a number of algorithms. For a simple example, say a medley relay, you have four swimmers and estimates of their times for each stroke. One minimizes the overall time for the relay by picking the combination of the smallest sum of times. For more swimmers and missing data, the problem becomes slightly more complicated - but solvable in a reasonable amount of time.
Of course, such an algorithm does not take into account intangibles - such as good will, participation (giving everyone a chance to swim on a relay) and of course, the swimmer who swims much faster (slower) in a relay situation as opposed to an individual event.
It would be cool to create a program that optimizes a dual meet line up.
