Hey capt'n, welcome back! How was Tahiti? :wink:
I rather enjoy the meandering conversation, actually. It's fun for me to think about new problems like this and, believe it or not, I'm actually drinking tea!
I think I'd be shocked if this were actually the application that the first post was so mysterious about!
To be clear, though, (unless I'm totally off track here) this problem sounds quite complicated and I imagine a solution for it would probably have an extremely narrow appeal. I'm already basically working for peanuts, hoping that college fund contributions will grow over time. My wife would probably divorce me if I tried to tell her that an API application for this would make good "business sense" -- I'm not convinced of that at all.
That said, the problem I stated in my previous post does indeed intrigue me, and I'll surely give it some thought -- I love a good puzzle!
Oh -- and next week's tea topic: How many teeth does a snakehead fish have? :?:
Glad to see you back, captainCosmic.
-Alex