Problem Description
It’s preseason and the local newspaper wants to publish a preseason ranking of the teams in the local amateur basketball league. The teams are the Ants, the Buckets, the Cats, the Dribblers, and the Elephants. When Scoop McGee, sports editor of the paper, gets the rankings from the selected local experts down at the hardware store, he’s dismayed to find that there doesn’t appear to be total agreement and so he’s wondering what ranking to publish that would most accurately reflect the rankings he got from the experts. He’s found that finding the median ranking from among all possible rankings is one way to go.
The median ranking is computed as follows: Given any two rankings, for instance ACDBE a