[mythtv-users] scheduler settling with conflicts where they are resolvable

[Ronald Frazier]

On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 4:23 PM, E. Westbrook <mythtv-users at westbrook.com> wrote:
> I've wondered about the strategy of simply generating ALL of the possible
> permutations, scoring them, and selecting the top one.

That's possible to do in some cases, but it's going to break down
really REALLY bad when people have busy schedules. For instance,
looking at my schedule for the next 2 weeks, I've got 191 programs
scheduled to record, and 211 deactivated later showings. So on
average, I've got over 2 showings per episode in my schedule. To
calculate ALL possible permutations is going to give us greater than
2^191 possibilities.


> I've also wondered about what would constitute sufficient resources for
> something like that to be practical.  :)

Well, in my case, that comes to roughly 10^57 possibilities. According
to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_content

"A typical star has a mass of about 2×10^30 kg, which is about 1×10^57
atoms of hydrogen per star."

So, if you can figure out how to store 1 permutation per hydrogen
atom, then the Sun is just waiting for you to use it as your storage
mechanism (well, maybe not, because I believe our sun is actually
smaller than average).

-- 
Ron Frazier