Christian Conrad At work we have the same issue, but with weights and not percentages. Customers only know a total weight for a shipment, but has to fill in per-item weight in some form that's sent to customs. For various reasons, most of the time it's acceptable to distribute the total weight based on the per-item value.
However the per-item weight must be a whole number, and the sum must also add to match the total given. Hence we have the exact same problem as in this poll: we have to round each per-item weight, but in a way which preserves the sum.
Yeah, but do you call what you do "rounding," Asbjørn Heid, or "distributing" or some such? (Damn, I can't remember the English or Swedish terms right now. "Vyörytys" or "jyvitys" in Finnish, though I doubt that helps. ;-) )
Christian Conrad At work we have the same issue, but with weights and not percentages. Customers only know a total weight for a shipment, but has to fill in per-item weight in some form that's sent to customs. For various reasons, most of the time it's acceptable to distribute the total weight based on the per-item value.
ReplyDeleteHowever the per-item weight must be a whole number, and the sum must also add to match the total given. Hence we have the exact same problem as in this poll: we have to round each per-item weight, but in a way which preserves the sum.
Yeah, but do you call what you do "rounding," Asbjørn Heid, or "distributing" or some such? (Damn, I can't remember the English or Swedish terms right now. "Vyörytys" or "jyvitys" in Finnish, though I doubt that helps. ;-) )
ReplyDeleteChristian Conrad I have to round the weights to whole numbers after distributing the weights, and it's the rounding that disturbs the sum.
ReplyDelete