People, I CAN'T believe you're STILL having problems with this material. OK...I'll go over the solution, but we can't waste all this time revisiting these sorts of simple problems or we'll never cover any of the new material. Alright. So, we are starting with 8 people, assuming spouses and offspring carry a uniform coeficient of zero, thus allowing those terms to be dropped from the equation. Let Jim be denoted as J, and Keith, Kendy, Susan, Mary, Gwen, Frank, and Stacey be denoted K_m, K_b, S_p, M, G, F, and S_f, respectively. We will set J = 1, to denote the Jim's room. As previously stated, Jim's room, R[J], has 1 queen size bed, and we can set the occupancy equal to 1.0 (I'm normalizing all of the values so they can be represented as a real number from 0 to 1 inclusive). Frank's room starts out in the initial state as being in the same equivalence class as Jim's, since they both have single queen-size beds, in other words, R[J], R[F] are elements of [q]. (Frank's occupancy coefficient is NOT equivalent to Jim's. The proof of this is left to the reader. Hint: the zero spouse weighting coefficient is no longer a valid assumption.) Now, we get to the heart of the matter, the equation for the suite, which is in the equivalence class [s] (not to be confused with S_p or S_f). First, we can simplify things by setting K_m equal to K_b sine Keith and Kendy will be staying together in the same room, and solve the two equations simultaneously, which we will denote by K. Thus R[K_m] = R[K_b] or 1 = R[K_b]/R[K_m]. And then we can simplify it as 0 = (R[K_b]/R[K_m]) - 1 (we will refer to this as equation 1). Now, recall that while Susan and Stacy do NOT yet have assigned rooms, they CAN only be in one room at a given time, hence their INDIVIDUAL occupency coefficents are both 1.0 (now it should be clear why I chose to normalize all the results of the earlier steps). So, you know the occupancy coefficents of Jim, Susan, Stacey. Keith and Kendy's can be easily derived and Frank's can be set as a dependent variable to one of the earlier equations. From that, you can derive a weighted, normalized value for the number of people that are there, and then, as a final step, you can plug in the actual spouse/offspring coeffients and calculate the resultant number of rooms, room assignements, as well as home many people are actually in the suite. Now I've spent too much time on this material already, it's time to move on. Oh yes, the bonus part: remember, while, in theory, you can keep adding cots to a room, there IS an upper bound to it, which the lesser of the number of people or the number of cots. Now if you use L'Hopital's rule and Bernoulli's Principal, you should be able to get the answer. Oh, and you might as well skip the part involving complex numbers and just stick with real numbers. --Doctor Asshole, PhD.