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        riddles >> easy >> Highway layout pattern
        
(Message started by: Yves on Feb 17^th, 2003, 8:36am)

Title: Highway layout pattern
Post by Yves on Feb 17^th, 2003, 8:36am

I started wondering about this one while driving around, I have no clue as to what the solution may be (though I have a few ideas).

Consider current highway systems, where the optimal highway solution has the big cities with the most traffic connected by the smallest distance.
What if the population/traffic density is the same everywhere? In other words, if you had a surface, and the probability for someone to go from point a to point b within that surface was the same for all 'a' and 'b', and you could draw curves/lines on this surface that would diminish the cost of travelling from a to b, what would the curves look like, if you had to optimize for curve length?
Would it be a square grid? Triangles? Something else?

Title: Re: Highway layout pattern
Post by BNC on Feb 17^th, 2003, 9:13am

Take a look here (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=riddles_hard;action=display;num=1044017195)