Thanks for the advice - and if this weren't a completely bananas project, I'd be doing that instead. However, part 3 is a thinly veiled excuse to play with neu

Thanks for the advice - and if this weren't a completely bananas project, I'd be doing that instead. However, part 3 is a thinly veiled excuse to play with neural nets and I learned a ton (code is done, post is about 1/3 written). The opener to part 3 is an elaborate excuse as to why I didn't do the simple thing (as you've mentioned). One quirk of using NN for that task is that since I've already got all of the possible outcomes, I need to deliberately overfit to my data (and it's a rare case where 100% accuracy is to be expected). Of course that's a good sign I shouldn't be using NN anyways, but we've beaten that drum...