Future Contests - your suggestions

[quadra23]

Note: this is the exact some post as I replied with in the Future Contests topic, it seems that I didn't post it in the right topic since this is more of a suggestion.

I think an excellent contest would be one that implements the Condorcet Voting method ( explained for example, at http://electionmethods.org/ ). Since it's a more fair voting system that improves immensely on our current voting system. This would be a worthwhile and very real life project IMHO.

I'm sure this could be done with PHP and MySQL although it will probably get far more complicated with a variable number of candidates (adding more to the programming fun and learning!). Anyone else think this is a good idea?

Ok so I got sorta got this idea from: http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2004/Final...sProblemSet.pdf

The problem is called merging maps. Basically your script will be passed a 3 dimensional array, the first dimension is the number of the map segment you are merging, the next two are x and y coordinates representing a graph so
something like this: (i dont know if this will work its an example)

0000D
000DF
000EE    
00EGG
0000H

so the input for the left hand upper corner would be $map[1][0][0] and it would be equal to zero because a zero is there.

The idea of the script is to take these segments of map and merge them together into a large (square) map with like features near to each other (the features are represented by letters and the script should align like features diagonally, horizontally or vertically. When the maps are merged they must form a perfect square.