Hey folks,

First post-webmaster-talk post .

I am working on a website that will help people become more healthy. The basic idea is to use government data to define the amount of different nutrients and calores that a person needs, and then automatically adjust portion sizes in pre-made meal plans to meet this. Hopefully that made sense .

I need to create a function that would work similar to Excel's Solver when it would find the optimum level (in this case the level that minimizes the total difference between the optimal nutritional intake, and the actual one provided by the menu), and then round it to workable sizes.

Can anyone suggest specific functions or tutorials that I should be looking at before I go ahead and tackle this project? My basic plan now is to use to loop through a formula until it finds the lowest error amount. The tricky part will be figuring out how to best deal with multiple meals in one day.

Let me know if I can be more clear with what it is that I'm trying to do here.

Thanks

There are a number of mathematical functions which can be applied to minimize various characteristics of models. You'll need to be more specific and probably evaluate different algorithms to determine which is best for you -- as an example, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares for linear relationships and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_series for recurring patterns, though there are a number more depending on the model you're going for and the data entered. This question is at the first stage and requires analysis before going into the coding of it.