[Ether]

Originally Posted by gblake

I recommend banishing the word "fair" from your vocabulary if it isn't paired up with more information.

Well said !

Like Jesse, I too have written a scheduling program.

As have I, for widely different tournament situations.

I took the brute force & heuristics approach.

Meaning what, exactly?

- generate the space S of all possible tournaments

- assign a score to each of these tournaments using weighted criteria

- pick the tournament with the highest score

OR

- randomly generate a tournament

- assign a score to the tournament using weighted criteria

- stop when you find one with an acceptable score

OR

- construct a tournament using some rules

- assign a score to the tournament using weighted criteria

- stop when you find one with an acceptable score

OR

something else?

The scheduling problem isn't that hard.

Finding an acceptable solution isn't that hard. Finding the solution that best fits your selection criteria can be quite difficult if the search space is large.