He needs to generate a tennis schedule for his league of 10 people. There are 37 weeks, and 8 people play per week (2 people sit out per week). First of all, he wants everyone to play about the same amount of time. This part is easy to figure out.
+ Show Spoiler [Calculation of how many times people w…] +
There are 8 people playing per week for a total of 37 weeks, so there are 296 people-weeks. Divide that by the total number of players (10) to get 29.6 weeks played. So, I suppose that means 6 people will play 30 times while 4 people will play 29 times.
Each week, there are two games of doubles. Therefore, 2 people on team A play 2 people on team B, while 2 people on team C play 2 people on team D. My friend needs to mix it up each week so that everyone is paired with different people, and goes up against different combinations of opponents. He was going to do it all by hand out on paper and tally it up in order to keep it as fair and diverse as possible, but I told him to hold on since it's much easier to do this with planning, and possibly the help of a computer.
What would you consider an easy solution to this problem? The methods I can think of for doing a 'good' job would be time consuming and would require me to look some stuff up that I haven't done in a while, so I figured I'd open it up to suggestions. There might be a trivial way to do this that isn't occurring to me. Thanks in advance for anyone who offers any advice.