boolean decisions

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Robin Becker wrote:

> I have a couple of business decisions to make that essentially use 6
> binary input variables. After the business users have gone back and forth
> for two weeks trying to build special case rules I asked them to make up a
> table containing all of the input possibilities and specify what should
> happen in each case. There are only 64 rows and some of the decisions are
> obviously explainable in simple ways ie
> 
> if a and not b do action 1
> 
> is there a way to derive simplified rules for each binary outcome? I'm
> sure this is a standard sort of problem and probably some python code is
> out there. It seems to me I need to solve an overdetermined binary
> equation system and then choose the solution with the shortest number of
> terms or something, but perhaps I am daft.

Triggered this in some deep-rootet parts of my brain stem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine-McCluskey_algorithm

Diez