boolean decisions

[Paddy]

On Feb 5, 10:52 am, Robin Becker <ro... at reportlab.com> 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.
> --
> Robin Becker

Try:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map

Their are useful links at the bottom, too.

- Paddy.