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As you can probably tell from the way this is formulated, I am not a mathematician. I'my trying to program something but I'm trying to do it well and I don't want to reinvent the wheel. There must a very well-established way of doing this, but I don't know its name.

Let's say I have 1000 items and I want to distribute them to 4 people (A, B, C and D). But I add a coefficient to all four people. A has coefficient 1, B has coefficient 2, C has 3 and D has 4. That's easy. I add up all of the coefficients, 4 * 5 / 2 = 10. Then I divide my number of items by the total (100) and multiply each person's share by the that number multiplied by the coefficient (coefficient * 100). A gets 100, B gets 200, etc. Easy.

Now, what if I want to make this distribution more uneven? What if I want A to get less than 100 and D to get more than 400? How do I do that? Is there a name for it? Is there a formula that lets me adjust how uneven the distribution will be? My guess is that it will have something to do with exponentials and logarithms, but I can't really understand how the math discussion relates the practical side. (Again, I love math, but I haven't done that much of it.) Still, this must be a pretty standard problem.

(I'm not sure I put the right tag to this question either. Sorry.)

eje211
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  • Only a note: If you call $a,b,c,d$ the coefficients, and you impose $a+b+c+d=10$, then $A$ will get $100a$, $B$ will get $100b$ etc.. So, if you want an uneven distribution, why don't you set it yourself? – Exodd Jun 18 '15 at 19:21
  • Each letter has a different Coefficient A to D has 1 to 4. The coefficients will be arbitrary in reality. A could be 53 and C could be 44. But I want the end distribution to show more difference that the coefficients do. – eje211 Jun 18 '15 at 20:02

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