Is that still true?

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I may be totally wrong on this, but I've got a very clear recollection of being told, years ago, that the variables that had to be taken into consideration in order to build successful school class scheduling software were simply too numerous to make such software viable. I remember wondering even then whether this was truly the case. After all, though questions of available rooms, teachers' days off, mandatory subjects, and more, may make building a program of this sort rather daunting, there are no doubt other similarly difficult tasks that computers have succeeded in accomplishing. What's more, if hand-made schedules end up with, let's say, one classes' three periods of physical education concentrated all on the same day, it's hard to think that a computer would do the work worse.

But software for this task has been on exhibit at conferences for years already. I used to ask the groups exhibiting these tools whether this wasn't considered an impossible task, but after just about all of them responded (as expected) that it was very difficult, but that they had done it, I sort of lost interest in the subject.

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Go to: Does Web 2.0 hurt conferences?, or
Go to: The tedium of real time.