

Show HN: Automatically build a schedule of films at the Seattle film festival - tdicola
http://www.tonydicola.com/siff2013/

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tdicola
I love watching movies at the Seattle Film Festival every year, but hate
trying to find showtimes that don't conflict with each other. I created this
web app as a simple tool to automatically build a schedule for a list of
selected movies at the festival. This tool takes the pain out of building a
schedule--just select films that are interesting and let the tool do the rest.

If you're curious for more details, the scheduling algorithm uses some simple
heuristics to generate a schedule since there's an exponential increase in
potential schedules as you select more movies. Specifically I pick films that
have no conflicts and use a lookup table of movies being shown each hour to
more quickly check for conflicts. There's also some logic to weight the
decision of a showtime based on different criteria like if the showtime occurs
on weekends, early in the day, late in the day, etc. The algorithm isn't
perfect and specifically doesn't try to schedule two films that only occur at
the same time (I'd rather defer to the user to pick films that resolve
conflict).

And yes, the tool uses a painfully stock Bootstrap CSS. I wanted to focus on
getting something functional and usable quickly. :)

