[PL-sem-jr] Scheduling, etc.

[Richard C. Cobbe]

Afternoon, all.

Well, I've heard from the 211 folks that they have labs all day Tuesday,
so we need to adjust our scheduling to match.  So, based primarily on
room availability and what I remember from the chart I drew yesterday,
our meeting next week will be on Thursday, 9/18, from 11-1, in Egan
306.  (Note the change in location.)

In order to choose a long-term timeslot, please send me a list of your
conflicts, in the format that I describe below.  Quoting John Clemens:

> [...] I'm proposing an input grammar from the set of s-expressions,
> defined as follows:
> 
> A Schedule is a list of conflicts
> A conflict is a list of three elements: a symbol, a time, and a time, 
> where
> - the symbol is 'bad or 'impossible, and
> - a time is a list of two elements: a number in [1 ... 5] indicating 
> the day and a number [0 ... 24] indicating the hour.
> 
> A time is taken to represent an hour boundary.
> 
> Overlapping conflicts are legal.
> 
> Overlapping conflicts of types 'bad and 'impossible are taken to be a 
> conflict of type 'impossible.
> 
> A candidate time slot is assigned a value which is a pair of numbers 
> indicating the number of 'bad conflicts and the number of 'impossible 
> conflicts.
> 
> A pair (a,b) is considered 'greater' than a pair (b,c) if (a<=b and b 
> <= c).
> 
> I propose to generate a list of all candidates which are upper bounds
> under this comparison.
> 
> [...]
> 
> The solution will be parameterized by the set of candidates; initially, 
> this will be taken to be all [two]-hour blocks whose start is no 
> earlier than 8 and whose end is no later than [17].

So, for instance, my conflicts would be

'((impossible (3 12) (3 14))        ;; PL seminar
  (impossible (3 14) (3 17))        ;; Ramsey seminar
  (impossible (5 14) (5 17))        ;; Ramsey seminar
  (impossible (4 15) (4 17))        ;; PhD seminar
  (bad (3 8) (3 17)))               ;; only 1 seminar on wednesday, please!

So, if each of you could send me this scheduling info in a private email
within the next couple of days, I'll tally the results and hopefully
arrive at something that doesn't conflict with too many people's
schedules.  (Insert standard comparison to herding cats.)

Richard