: I am considering writer (yet another...) football management simulation, one of the stumbling blocks being how to generate the set of fixtures. There must be a blindingly obvious solution to this?
:
: Say, for example, there were 8 teams in a division, first week would be:
:
: (Home team no. v Away team no.)
:
: 1 v 2
: 3 v 4
: 5 v 6
: 7 v 8
:
: 2nd week:
:
: 1 v 3
: 2 v 4
: 5 v 7
: 6 v 8
:
: but where from now? with 8 teams i could simply work out by hand how to achieve this, but with 20?!
:
: Anyone encountered this problem before?
Yes. I forget the generalised name for this problem, but try asking the folks
in rec.puzzles - they love this sort of thing. There are generic algorithms