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  • There are Num guys
  • The sum of their ages is Tot
  • The Age of every one of them is Min <= Age <= Max

I want to create a formula for a program to calculate the total number of possibilities

Any ideas/links that point me to the right direction are appreciated

joriki
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ajax333221
  • 455
  • What you are asking seems to be about partitions of a number, and more specifically partitions of Tot - Num*Min with at most Num summands and no summand greater than Max - Min. Formulas for this kind of thing can be pretty hard to program, but setting up a loop to run through all of the possibilities and count them is pretty straightforward. See Henry Bottomley's online partition calculators for some ideas. – hardmath Apr 23 '12 at 18:22
  • @BrettFrankel sorry, I wasn't familiarized with any tags, but after some time reading I think I found some that fit ^^ – ajax333221 Apr 23 '12 at 18:58
  • @ajax333221: Those tags were inapproriate -- I replaced them with [tag:combinatorics]. – joriki Apr 23 '12 at 19:25

1 Answers1

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You can map this to the problem of balls in bins with limited capacity by subtracting $\text{Num}\cdot\text{Min}$ from $\text{Tot}$ and then distributing the remainder into $\text{Num}$ bins with equal capacity $\text{Max}-\text{Min}$. The above page gives a formula for the case of equal capacities at the very end, which can be derived using the inclusion–exclusion principle by considering the number of bins filled to capacity.

joriki
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