StOp 1.4: Simulated Annealing in Python, Part 3: Allocating Groups by AI

I quite enjoy discussions. However, talking just to people within my friend circle can sometimes become boring. After all, I tend to attract similar perspectives, and to occasionally challenge my own outlook, and see things from another vantage point is something I'd like to do. Events with discussion groups are a great place to do this.

But one thing that tends to be a challenge with such events, is who to allocate which group to. Let's say there are 5 discussion groups, and the Google Form you have created allows a prospective participant to select their First-Choice and Second-Choice. How do you decide which groups to allocate to each participant? And this is a more general problem than the obscure idea of a discussion event: it could apply in a virtual conference of educational seminars, or even in class allocations.

The most interesting part about AI, is its ability to express and solve seemingly subjective problems. Yes, I do mean that Simulated Annealing can solve this problem. Here's my Python Code to solve the problem. Don't worry if you hate Python - this is the last part of this Series, and after some more Stochastic Optimization, we're going to actually get into doing Machine Learning with Python!

To simulate this situation, I first created a Google Sheet with ID, and various First and Second Choices between 1 & 5, which I inputted randomly. Because of this, there's a little bit of Data Manipulation, but that isn't too important to the Annealing, so you can ignore that if you are not familiar with Pandas (a data handling library for Python). After running the second cell, you will need to upload the Sheet of IDs and Choices. You will find that file here. You can download this and then upload it into the button that will become visible when you run the second cell.

The notebook is available here. Open it, and follow the standard protocol: open with Google Colab to mess with it or run it - or just go through the notebook as visible to get an idea of what we're doing.

If you'd like to modify the code for some application, I'd love to know how you're using the idea!

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