My favorite programming assignment in school was a Scheme implementation of the "stable marriage algorithm". "Let's assume, for the sake of an argument, that y

My favorite programming assignment in school was a Scheme implementation of the "stable marriage algorithm". "Let's assume, for the sake of an argument, that you are a village matchmaker given the task of marrying 100 men and 100 women. Each of the men has ranked the women from 1 to 100 in the order of his preference; each woman, not to be outdone, has similarly ranked the 100 men...Rather than insist that everyone get their first choice, you are instead charged with creating 100 stable marriages. A set of marriages is said to be stable if there exists no man m and woman w such that m likes w better than his wife, and w likes m better than her husband. The notion is called "stability" as m's and w's marriages are unstable, since (albeit sordid and tawdry) m and w could optimize their sorry lot in life by leaving their mates and running off together." Non-PDF link: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:abZ7sCKHUmYJ:www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/Courses/cs21b/marry.pdf&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:abZ7sCKHUmYJ:www.cs.bra... Not the same as algorithms discussed in the article but fun and interesting.