My Little Pony XLVIII: I say Ol' Chap, how about those Equestrians?

[Zigg'rrauglurr]

Command Line is a cool name!

Ok so that's 2 or 3 votes for the name, I think I like it more every time I read it or say it.

This is a thing that totally needs to happen. For SCIENCE!

If the idea is to create a crackship generator, shipping more than two ponies together needs to be possible, albeit rather less likely. Also, randomised genderbending of one or more parties.

Ok, What I'm thinking is ...

OK! So with the possibility of m-pony shipping (e.g. [1]) the general formula for all-distinct ponies is N·(N-1)·...·(N-m+1)/(m!) so the number of available ships grows as O(N^m). (For later clarity, call the first formula S)

We could also have the generator also tells us how to lay out the relationships within an m pony ship. Figuring out how many ways it can that is much more complicated - TV Tropes illustrates the cases available for a love triangle. Simplify things and make all love requited; then fail badly at working it out yourself () and look it up at Wolfram MathWorld...

which seems right for m=1,2,3 at least. Multiply the number by S to get the number of possible generator outputs containing m ponies.

If we let the ponies be assigned to any of g genders (probably taking g=3) then we get g^m times as many outputs containing m ponies.

To take a concrete example, suppose the generator deals with only the Mane Six (so n=6) assigned to three gender identity categories (g=3) and there are no clones or other ways to ship a pony with herself. There are...

• 135 two-pony ships
• 2160 three-pony ships
• 46170 four-pony ships
• 1061424 five-pony ships
• 19467216 ships involving the entire Mane Six

Leave out gender, and we get

• 15 two-pony ships (and a fic)
• 80 three-pony ships
• 570 four-pony ships
• 4368 five-pony ships
• 26704 ships involving the entire Mane Six

I'm not actually sure why I computed this, but hopefully someone will find it interesting.

Oh, god. I dug myself an early grave, right?

Don't you use your fancy mathematics to muddle the issue!

mmm... As I was saying, this is what I envisioned.

The application will take a raw text file that will contain all the names in a list, and will look for pictures in folder with the same name than the character, png/bmp/jpg extension, if it does not find it, no picture, just the name.

The file would be formatted as this:

Twilight Sparkle
Rainbow Dash
Pinkie Pie
Fluttershy
Rarity

etc...

The GUI itself will allow to specify:
- Number of participants. Dropdown
- Checkmark "or more" (Will add more participants with a... 50% chance for each level, so if you select 2 participants and check this you get: 50% of three, 25% of four, 12,5% of five, and so on... perhaps configurable chance?
- Checkmark "Genderbend"
- Number of genderbended.
- Checkmark "or more" works as above.

If the result says it's genderbended it will notify it near the name...
like:

GENDERBENDED Rainbow Dash
with
Twilight Sparkle

Sounds good?

Can I get some help organizing the source data?
How about a "Include non-pony" Checkmark, or that will be a default. Also that would require to source files with names.

So do I get the grant for this science project?

Edit: I will most probably program this in .Net because I'm a lazy bastard sometimes, so no Linux version for you...