Challenge #144: Secret Santa Assignments (BAH HUMBUG!)

[afreedman]

Yay!

[hbraunius]

My solution attached.

[FredySantana]

Hi,

This challenge was funny, and I enjoyed a lot. Here is my solution. Thanks for the challenge.

[Kenda]

Spoiler

Different order than the given output but same results

[Vidya26]

My Solution

[Alekh]

I remember this being the most recent challenge available when I first began using Alteryx. I tried forever trying to solve it but couldn't. Now that I know how to do iterative macros, it was a LOT easier and even managed to get it in the exact same order as the output solution. Definitely a milestone challenge for me.

Spoiler

[SeanAdams]

OK – I spent way too long on this one.
I must admit – did this 5 different ways before looking at other people’s solutions and was super embarrassed by just how elegant @patrick_digan ; @vsoni ; @jdunkerley79  etc solutions were. 

I threw everything at this - location optimizer; batch; iterative - they all worked for a subset, but not for the 50...   Guess that's the pain of NP Complete type algorithms.

Welcome to the weekly challenges @LeahNeuenkirchen !

Spoiler

(did an iterative solution like @CHarrison ; @JoBen ;  @kat ; @cgoodman3 – and similarly to @CHarrison  didn’t get a result after 10 000 iterations - but if I strip these down to a smaller number of people they all work)

The genius of the simple mentiod other people provided is that you just d


Solutions used:
1: Simple chain - match each person to the next in the list in a ring, ignoring scrooginess


2: then location optimizer to find matches within the scrooginess threshold
- This one is a random process by definition and with 50 items this is a huge solution space to find a solution randomly.


3: Then did a random-try batch macro
4: then an iterative macro
5: then an iterative macro with a reduced match set to eliminate known bad matches

6: finally - did the 50% list split like the wise folk mentioned above

Even though these didn't work on the full data set - still a great practice for different kinds of macros!

[anaibeth]

Took the beginners approach, and it still shameful but it works lol. Baby steps!

[bjangelloz]

Over thought it but glad the data is perfect or else we would have more trouble with the simpler solutions!