COMP 3200 - Fall 2023 - Project 2

Due by 11:59pm on Monday, October 30, in my email inbox. Send your program as an attachment.

The late penalty is 5% per hour.

Using the language you selected, write a program to solve the Instruens Fabulam problem from the 2000 archives of the ACM Mid-Central USA Regional Programmming Contest. The precise input and output format is specified (including filenames), and your output must match byte-for-byte. Your program must consist of one source file called "fab.zzz", where zzz is an appropriate extension for your language. Additional sample input/output can be found here.

For this project, you may choose to either use your language's File I/O capabilities, or assume that the standard input and output are used. You must, when you submit your project, indicate which option you have selected, and include complete instructions for how to run your code.

Remember that this problem is just one of eight that were designed to be solved during one five-hour contest.

Grading will be on a 100-point scale, based partially on the number of test cases successfully completed, and partially on the degree to which you have conformed to the output specifications.

Rules

• All output will be judged using a file comparison utility, so output must be exactly as shown in the examples. Spelling, punctuation, spacing, and case (uppercase/lowercase) are all significant.
• I will ignore all output to the standard err. Only the contents of the standard out will be judged. You can write as much debugging information to stderr as you want (if your language supports it).
• Your program cannot require any intervention by the user. For example, you cannot pause the program and ask the user to press a key to continue. If you do, you will be flagged with a Submission Error.
• All my test cases will conform to the input specifications. It is not necessary for you to detect invalid input.
• Input files and correct output files will obey the following rules.
  • Other than end-of-line characters, spaces are the only whitespace that appear.
  • Two or more consecutive spaces do not appear, unless specifically mentioned in the problem statement.
  • Spaces do not appear at the end of lines.
  • Spaces do not appear at the beginning of lines, unless specifically mentioned in the problem statement.
  • Blank lines do not appear in the file.
  • All lines, including the last line in the file, end with the standard end-of-line marker. (In MS-DOS and Windows 9x/NT this is the standard carriage-return/linefeed sequence; in Unix it is a single linefeed.)

• Plagiarism   Copying all or part of anyone else's code, regardless of the source, is prohibited. Exception: you may use code that I provide in class. Excessive collaboration is a more subtle form of plagiarism involving two or more students in the class; see below.

• Collaboration   Here's the rule:

  You are encouraged to discuss ideas with other students but you may not share any code or answers.

  That's it. If you turn in code or answers that are the same as (or very similar to) someone else's, then you have cheated. I don't care what your intentions were. If, after analyzing your code/answers, I think it is statistically very likely that sharing has occurred, I will divide the credit among the offending parties (on the first offense), assign a 0 (on the second offense), or assign an F for the course (on the third offense). Note: when determining whether two pieces of code are the same, I ignore irrelevant differences such as variable names, whitespace, comments, indentation, parentheses, brackets, literal strings, declaration order, and simple logical and/or algebraic code translations.

• Unacceptable excuses

  • "I was trying to help this guy, but he was really thick-headed, so I finally just said, 'Here, look at my solution so you can see what I mean.'"
  • "We just traded code to make sure we're getting the same answers." or "We just traded code so we could check each other's work for errors." Note: it's OK to trade compiled code for these reasons, but not source code.
  • "I thought it was OK to work together."
  • "I thought it was OK to work together as long as we gave the names of everyone we worked with."