CS 2420 – Fall 2006
Assignment 5 – 20 points
Due Oct 11, 2006
Railroad Tycoon – Part II
Story Line:
It’s still a wild frontier out there, in the Australian Outback (see the previous assignment). And you still
need to get a set of railroad lines in place. And because money is still an important thing in your life,
you want to make your railroad lines for as little money as possible.
Designing railroads with Prim’s Algorithm using a linear search to find the min-cost edge to add to the
tree is a somewhat time-expensive operation, though. That’s why you are going to employ your new
secret weapon: Priority Queues.
Objective:
Given a set of towns, their locations, and their elevations, write a function that designs a railroad
network designed to service each town at minimum cost, using a min-cost spanning tree algorithm based
on priority queues. For this assignment, you must write your own priority queue code. Thou shalt
borrow not from the book, nor from the standard template library, nor from any other source, save your
brain(s).
Details, details:
You are to read from standard input a list of towns, followed by three integers describing an x and y
coordinate (in kilometers), and an elevation (also in kilometers):
<town name> <x coordinate> <y coordinate> <elevation>
The last town in the list is always called “Zaboonaboon.”
You may assume a maximum number of 50 towns, if you wish.
The cost to create a railroad between two points can be determined by the following equation:
cost(k$) = distance + (10 * distance * sine(elevation_angle) )
For example, two towns 1km from each other on the same elevation could be joined by a railroad for a
cost of 1 Australian kilodollar, but two towns 1km from each other with a height different of 100 meters
would cost roughly 1.995 Australian kilodollars.
CS 2420 – Assignment 5 Page 1
