Is there a way to map a multi-variable structure onto a single range?
If you want to solve this for colors, there are many techniques that are appropriate in that domain.  But you say you aren't really asking about colors, so I'll treat it as an analogy and try to give an answer that is more general (but wouldn't be what I would recommend for colors):
It sounds like you want to cluster the possible values into multiple clusters.  I would suggest you read about clustering algorithms. You'll need to pick a &quot;similarity measure&quot; that measures how similar two structures are.  That is domain-specific and not something we can tell you; you'll have to pick it based on your knowledge of the specific application domain.