H-99: Problem 27

Group the elements of a set into disjoint subsets.

a) In how many ways can a group of 9 people work in 3 disjoint subgroups of 2, 3 and 4 persons? Write a function that generates all the possibilities and returns them in a list.

Example:

* (group3 '(aldo beat carla david evi flip gary hugo ida))
( ( (ALDO BEAT) (CARLA DAVID EVI) (FLIP GARY HUGO IDA) )
... )

b) Generalize the above predicate in a way that we can specify a list of group sizes and the predicate will return a list of groups.

Example:

* (group '(aldo beat carla david evi flip gary hugo ida) '(2 2 5))
( ( (ALDO BEAT) (CARLA DAVID) (EVI FLIP GARY HUGO IDA) )
... )

Note that we do not want permutations of the group members; i.e. ((ALDO BEAT) ...) is the same solution as ((BEAT ALDO) ...). However, we make a difference between ((ALDO BEAT) (CARLA DAVID) ...) and ((CARLA DAVID) (ALDO BEAT) ...).

You may find more about this combinatorial problem in a good book on discrete mathematics under the term "multinomial coefficients".

Environment setup:

cabal sandbox init
cabal update
cabal install --only-dependencies
cabal configure --enable-tests

Run tests:

cabal test --show-details=always --test-option=--color

Test REPL:

cabal repl spec

use :main to run all tests and :r to load last changes.