General description

The primary motivation of this project is of course to get you to build and make use of data structures, and to take a look at benefits and shortcomings for each one. The TA's motivation though is to be able to make pretty pictures with some rudimentary drawing primitives. In project one we'll have you build a dictionary to keep track of named dots (of various sizes and colors) using java's api. You'll also get a warmup implementing an Adjacency List along with Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. In future parts of the project we will replace some data structures to examine performance tradeoffs. In particular you can probably expect to see the prof's old time favorite the PM3 quadtree, and the TA's favorite the B+ tree. We'll probably start off project 2 with a skiplist and a kdtree for working with spacial data. Expect a plot to evolve by project 2, possibly about a pinball planet. Or not. :)