Forming groups as nearly equal in sums as possible

[treesloth]

Hello. I'm not sure what type of problem this is that I'm trying to solve. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Suppose you have a list of numbers and you want to form them into, say, 4 groups such that the sum of each group is, as nearly as possible, equal to the sums of each of the other groups; basically, making groups with equal sums without regard to the number of elements in each. Is there a way to do that with certainty that the groups are as close as possible given the elements available? If not, is there a way to iteratively approach an optimal grouping? I'm just using a made-up dataset in R generated via:

x <- as.integer(runif(100, 250, 500))

Thanks in advance.

 

[treesloth]

After some more research, this is a subset sum problem, or, in some cases, partitioning. It can be addressed using iterations of the R subsetsum function in the adagio library.