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There are $N$ sticks. $N$ is an integer greater than zero. I want to divide it among $M$ boys. $M$ is also a positive integer. Partitioning $N$ among $M$ is easy, but doing it as evenly as possible is difficult for me to think through. Can someone suggest an algorithm? Similar questions exist on this site, but I could not find an answer that solves this problem, though it is possible that I overlooked something.

EDIT:

The sticks are all homogeneous, the same in every respect. What I mean by "as evenly as possible" is that if there are 6 sticks and 3 boys, the division algorithm should output 2-2-2. If there are 5 sticks among 3 boys, it should output 1-2-2. The disparity between the minimum stick holder and maximum stick holder should be minimized. Ordering does not matter (e.g. 1-2-2 is the same as 2-1-2).

cellepo
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user_1_1_1
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    What do you mean by "as equally as possible"? Are the sticks of different lengths/weights? Do you have a link to this problem somewhere? This description seems filled with ambiguity. – ryan May 09 '17 at 21:18
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    @ryan clarified above. – user_1_1_1 May 09 '17 at 21:46
  • You tag "optimization", but what do you want to optimize? Giving everybody nothing it perfectly equal. See here for a more interesting variant. – Raphael May 09 '17 at 22:57
  • OK, strictly speaking, essentially everything is an algorithm. But you just need to do division, here. – David Richerby May 10 '17 at 19:28
  • Related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10366327/dividing-a-integer-equally-in-x-parts – cellepo Dec 13 '19 at 22:36

3 Answers3

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Give some of the boys $\lfloor N/M \rfloor$ sticks (i.e., divide and round down), and some of them $\lceil N/M \rceil$ sticks (divide and round up). Once you fix those two numbers, that uniquely determines how many boys get $\lfloor N/M \rfloor$ sticks and how many get $\lceil N/M \rceil$ sticks -- do some simple arithmetic, try a few examples, use the fact that $\lceil N/M \rceil = \lfloor N/M \rfloor + 1$ if $M$ doesn't evenly divide into $N$, and you'll work out the general formula.

ryan
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D.W.
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# Divide perfectly homogeneously, as large as possible
for i = 0 to M
    array[i] = N / M    # integer division, resulting in floor

# Divide remainder
for i = 0 to N modulus K
    array[i] += 1
cellepo
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Give them $\lfloor\frac{N}{M}\rfloor$ sticks and then distribute the rest of sticks ($N-\lfloor\frac{N}{M}\rfloor$) among them by giving one stick to each boy until there are no more sticks. By solving it this way, the time complexity will be $\max(\lfloor\frac{N}{M}\rfloor, N \bmod M)$ .

Benjamin Davies
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Sardor Gulyamov
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