Apologies in advance if my terminology is off. I'm not a mathematician (just a programmer).
I have a set of item pairs (a shopping cart) where each item has a quantity
1x item A
1x item B
2x item C
1x item D
1x item E
I have a discount code that requires a minimum quantity of items in the cart in order to be applicable. The goal is to maximize the discount.
If the minimum was 3 items, there would be two candidates for this cart:
(A, B, C, D, E) = $50 discount
(A, B, C) (C, D, E) = $60 discount (since we can use 'C' twice)
Rather than brute-forcing it, is there an algorithm used for calculating the optimal way to partition sets of pairs like these? Or even a hint of a branch of maths I should be looking into?
Thanks in advance for any insight.