Three questions...
Does order matter? In particular, should {2,2,2,1,1,1} be considered as "good" as {1,1,1,2,2,2}? If I'm understanding this, these would score the same.Are all of these arrays the same length? If not, the score should be standardized for length.On a related note, do these arrays all contain the same number of unique elements? For example, do they all contain just 1's and 2's? Or might some also contain 3's, 4's, etc? This would also need to be standardized, since the first occurrence doesn't add to the score.Also, I'm not convinced about this approach. I understand that you want to quantify the degree to which an array corresponds to a desired order or "grouping." But I don't understand what this score actually
means, because I think this depends on what you need to
do with the arrays. For example, do you simply discard low-scoring arrays? Or do you need to "fix" them (which I assume has implications beyond mere sorting)? And if you're fixing them, are these scores actually representative of the amount of "work" required? In other words, what is this score really telling you?
[ February 23, 2006: Message edited by: marc weber ]