Re: Is there an easy way to find the right class?

Farcus Pottysquirt wrote:
what if I was sitting down with only a pad of paper, a pencil (with an eraser) and a reference like Java In a Nutshell (O'Reilly) how would I find the class/package I need without looking at each and every one until I find it?

Most books have a Contents section at the front and an index at the back. I'd look in the Contents section for topics that seem close to what I needed. If that didn't work I'd dream up a few likely keywords and look for them in the index.

Google is useful though.

Of course, the above are obvious to you already. Since you are not a member of the secret cabal, we're not telling you of the far superior secret method that you suspect exists.

Actually, for your problem as stated, a random walk algorithm should be quite good, the problem probably correlates quite well with some recent scientific research into food-gathering methods employed by various animals and hunter-gatherer tribes in a pre-agricultural setting. An occasional long distance relocation followed by a series of small random movements is apparently quite effective in simulations. I recommend that over a simple linear traversal of the search space.
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