Generating Lists in Mathematica - Solve Student Partnering Problem

[sambroni]

Hi-

I TA two lab sections, for which I need to have different partners for every student throughout the term. It's sort of a headache to do this by hand and it seemed like the Mathematica list function should be able to do this in a snap; but I'm having trouble writing the rules and syntax I need. I've been able to generate the lists via:
Table[Thread[{Table[i, {i, 16}],
Table[Mod[j + k, 16] + 1, {j, 16}]}], {k, 0, 10}]
but have had trouble winnowing down the lists.

Any help on this problem would be very appreciated. Thanks!

 

[sambroni]

Any thoughts?

 

[Dale]

I didn't understand your problem description. I get that you want to use lists, but not what you want to do with them.

 

[sambroni]

Thanks for your response.

The issue is that I need to pair up students each week (2 per group) from a class of 20. I have 11 weeks, and no two students may be in the same pair over the course of the semester. So I need to generate eleven lists of ten pairs such that 1-20 are paired up each week, and that no pairs are repeated.

e.g., week 1 could look like:
{{1,2},{3,4},{5,6},{7,8},{9,10},{11,12},{13,14},{15,16},{17,18},{19,20}}

and week 2 (up to week 11) couldn't reuse those pairs.

Thanks again!

 

[Dale]

I am not sure that there is a solution to this problem. There are only 190 possible pairs, and you have to use 110 of them. However, you have a very strong constraint that in each group of 10 pairs you must use each person exactly once. This severely constrains the number of possible combinations. I tried a few hundred thousand random permutations and didn't get a single successful one.

nStudents = 20;
nWeeks = 11;

lst = Table[
tmp = With[{pairs = KSubsets[Range[nStudents], 2]},
Take[Partition[
Permute[pairs, rnd = RandomPermutation[Length[pairs]]],
nStudents/2], nWeeks]]; {Table[nStudents, {nWeeks}] ==
Map[Length, Map[Union, Flatten[tmp, {{1}, {2, 3}}]]],
rnd}, {100000}];
Union[lst[[All, 1]]]