Due dates:
Interim report: Wednesday 09/01/2010, 11:55pm
Full assignment: Sunday 09/05/2010, 11:55pm.
Figure 1: A visual representation of the road system described in file
input1.txt.
Task
Implement a search algorithm that can find a route between any
two cities. Your program will be called find_route, and will
take exactly three commandline arguments, as follows:
find_route input_filename origin_city destination_city
An example command line is:
find_route input1.txt Munich Berlin
Argument input_filename is the name of a text file such as
such as input1.txt, that describes road
connections between cities in some part of the world. For example, the
road system described by file input1.txt can
be visualized in Figure 1 shown above. You can assume that the input
file is formatted in the same way as input1.txt: each line contains three items. The
last line contains the items "END OF INPUT", and that is how the
program can detect that it has reached the end of the file. The other
lines of the file contain, in this order, a source city, a destination
city, and the length in kilometers of the road connecting directly
those two cities. Each city name will be a single word (for example,
we will use New_York instead of New York), consisting of upper and
lowercase letters and possibly underscores.
IMPORTANT NOTE: MULTIPLE INPUT FILES WILL BE USED TO GRADE THE ASSIGNMENT, FILE input1.txt IS JUST AN EXAMPLE. YOUR CODE SHOULD WORK WITH ANY INPUT FILE FORMATTED AS SPECIFIED ABOVE.
The program will compute a route between the origin city and the
destination city,
and will print out both the length of the route and the list of all cities that
lie on that route. For example,
find_route input1.txt Bremen Frankfurt
should have the following:
distance: 455 km
route:
Bremen to Dortmund, 234 km
Dortmund to Frankfurt, 221 km
and
find_route input1.txt London Frankfurt
should have the following output:
distance: infinity
route:
none
For full credit, you should produce outputs identical in format to the
above two examples.
Interim report
The interim report should be submitted via e-mail to the instructor and the TA. The interim report should be a text (or Word or PDF or OpenOffice) document, containing a description (as brief or long as you want) of what you have done so far for the assignment, and any difficulties/bottlenecks you may have reached (in case you encounter such difficulties, it is highly recommended to contact the instructor and/or TA for help).
For purposes of grading, it is absolutely fine if your interim report simply states that you have done nothing so far (you still get the 10 points allocated for the interim report, AS LONG AS YOU SUBMIT THE REPORT ON TIME). At the same time, starting early and identifying potential bottlenecks by the deadline for the interim report is probably a good strategy for doing well in this assignment.
Suggestions
The code needs to run on omega. If you have not even tried logging in on omega until the last day, there is a high probability that something will go wrong. You may find it convenient to do the code development and testing on your own laptop or home machine, but it is highly recommended that you log in to omega and compile a toy program ASAP, and that you compile and run an intermediate version of your code well before the deadline. Notify the instructor for any problems you may have.
Pay close attention to all specifications on this page, including specifications about output format, submission format. Even in cases where the program works correctly, points will be taken off for non-compliance with the instructions given on this page (such as a different format for the program output, wrong compression format for the submitted code, and so on). The reason is that non-compliance with the instructions makes the grading process significantly (and unnecessarily) more time consuming.
Grading
The assignments will be graded out of 100 points.
- 10 points: Submitting the interim report according to the instructions, and on time.
- 30 points: The program always finds a route between the origin
and the destination, as long as
such a route exists.
- 30 points: In addition to the above requirement, the program
terminates and reports that no
route can be found when indeed no route exists that connects source and
destination (e.g., if source is London and destination is
Berlin, in the above example).
- 30 points: In addition to the above requirements, the program
always returns optimal routes. In other words, no shorter route exists
than the one reported by the program.
- Negative points: penalty points will be awarded by the
instructor and TA generously and at will, for issues such as: code not
running on omega, submission not including precise and accurate
instructions for how to run the code, wrong compression format for the
submission, or other failures to comply with the instructions given
for this assignment. Partial credit for incorrect solutions will be
given ONLY for code that is well designed and well documented. Code
that is badly designed and badly documented can still get full credit
as long as it accomplishes the required tasks.
How to submit
Implementations in C, C++, Java, and Python will be accepted. If you would like
to use another language, please first check with the instructor via
e-mail. Points will be taken off for failure to comply with this
requirement.
The assignment should be submitted via WebCT. Submit a ZIPPED directory called assignment1.zip (no other forms of compression accepted, contact the instructor or TA if you do
not know how to produce .zip files). The directory should contain source code. Including binaries that work on omega (for Java and C++) is optional. The submission should also contain a file called
readme.txt,
which should specify precisely:
- Name and UTA ID of the student.
- What programming language is used.
- How the code is structured.
- How to run the code, including very specific compilation
instructions, if compilation is needed. Instructions such as "compile using g++" are NOT
considered specific.
Insufficient or unclear instructions will be penalized by up to 20 points.
Code that does not run on omega machines gets AT MOST half credit (50 points).
Submission checklist
Is the code running on omega?
Does the submission include a readme.txt file, as specified?