This weekend I will be running a 5x5 km relay race and in preparation our team must decide on the order of when each runner will have their turn. Being a geek I naturally turned to computer science to help solve the problem.
Ordering by the initial letter in your first or last name is boring. Instead I decided on a more interesting approach, where I calculated the average ASCII value of our names.
For example a has the ASCII value 97, b 98 and so on. By adding that up and dividing the sum by the length of the name you have a full name representation and can use that for ordering. Coincidentally, this makes for an excellent opportunity to sharpen my Haskell skills!
The result is up at GitHub. Feel free to comment on it — I would love some feedback to improve my chops!
Team order
What of the race? Well, it looks like I got that third position I wanted!
$ ./AsciiOrder tobias viktor mariya tomas elin
106 elin
107 mariya
107 tobias
110 tomas
112 viktor
Now I just have to convince the team about the merits of this highly scientific method.