Time finder

time_finder.py

import itertools
import operator

# Student availability represented as a vector of truth values
# aka a binary number. First entry is 9am etc.

time_vector_list = [0b11101001110111101100,
  0b11100011110111101000,
  0b11110011110111100001,
  0b11110011110111100101,
  0b11111010100011100101,
  0b00100010100011100111,
  0b00101010000011100110,
  0b00111010000011110110,
  0b01101100000011110110,
  0b01101100010011110110,
  0b01101100011111110110]

def compute_binary_or(a, b):
  return bin(a|b)

pairings = list(itertools.combinations(time_vector_list,2))
results = {}

for pair in pairings:
  # Do the binary or and cast to string
  result = str(compute_binary_or(*pair))

  # First item in list corresponds to 9am hence offset
  first_time = time_vector_list.index(pair[0]) + 9
  second_time = time_vector_list.index(pair[1]) + 9

  # Set the value for each time pair to Hamming weight of the OR result
  results[(first_time, second_time)] = result.count('1')

# Output the dictionary sorted by value
print sorted(results.iteritems(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))