Algorithms: Sorting objects into sets for It's Academic

Title:

A proposal for condition-based sorting of objects into sets

Objective:

The goal of this project would be to investigate the sorting of objects into sets 
based on different conditions, and create an algorithm to do so. I plan to apply 
this to the development of “It’s Academic” rounds, given different questions and 
information about them.

Justification:

Currently, the system for creating rounds of It’s Academic questions is time 
consuming and prone to errors. The developer must ensure that the requisite 
number of each type of question are in each round, and also arrange the rounds in 
terms of difficulty. Also, repeated topics could occur, and those must be worked 
around. A computer could accomplish these tasks in a much shorter period of time, 
and with many fewer errors.

Description:

For this project, each object will have 3 characteristics: a numerical value, a type, 
and a list of keywords. The objective will be to sort these into sets, given the 
arrangement of types desired in each set. Also, each set should have a limited 
number of repeated keywords. I plan to apply this algorithm to the creation of 
“It’s Academic” rounds. Each object will be a question, and each question’s 
numerical value will be its difficulty. The rounds will then be created such that the 
first round is easiest, leading up to the hardest round, which will be the final one, 
based on the difficulty of the questions, with few repeating concepts and the 
required arrangement of questions per round.

Limitations:

The major limitation on the eventual adaptation of this project is the rating of 
each question; this will have to be done by hand, and therefore could lead to 
errors. Other major limitations include the human aspect of organizing questions; 
in order to get the question sets perfect, human editing will be needed, but the 
majority of the work can and will be done by the computer. Also, some sets of 
questions could be impossible to sort completely, and I would have to design my 
program to adapt to that possibility.