longest journey in tunnel

[Colin]

Just a thought - the Circle, East London, District, H & C and Met lines are in 'cut and cover' sections.

Only the Bakerloo, Central, Jubilee, Piccadilly, Northern, W & C and Victoria lines are in true tunnels.

That said the official 'tunnel section' on the district line is Earls Court to Edgware Road / Bow Road, Regardless of wether the likes of Sth Ken, Sloane Sq or Whitechapel are in the open.

[compsci]

Are there any open sections from Victoria to Tower Hill?

[q8]

Are there any open sections from Victoria to Tower Hill?.....................Yes several.

[Phil]

professorfox said:

The longet route I've found so far (and I think this could be the longest of all) is:

FROM	TO	LINE	DISTANCE
South Wimbledon	Stockwell	Northern	5.16
Stockwell	Finsbury Park	Victoria	7.96
Finsbury Park	King's Cross St. Pancras	Piccadilly	2.48
King's Cross St. Pancras	Camden Town	Northern	1.44
Camden Town	Kennington	Northern	4.29
Kennington	Bank	Northern	1.90
Bank	Bond Street	Central	2.68
Bond Street	Baker Street	Jubilee	1.07
Baker Street	Waterloo	Bakerloo	2.55
Waterloo	Bank	Waterloo & City	1.47
Bank	King's Cross St. Pancras	Northern	2.69
King's Cross St. Pancras	Green Park	Piccadilly	2.22
Green Park	North Greenwich	Jubilee	6.90
		TOTAL	42.81

Now all we need is volunteer(s) to set a record as to who can do it in the shortest time! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[compsci]

I was thinking of a "Troglodyte Challenge". It might have interesting effects on the participants.

[Deleted]

How did you get it to work it out? Is it a mod of the A* algorithm? (I'll go and hand myself over to the men in white coats)

Presumably, you can use the same thing to work out things other than distance.

[compsci]

It was actually a really dodgy kludge involving exhaustive depth first search, disabling lines once they are used, and then backtracking when there are no routes left out of a station. In theory you'd have to do this from every station on the map, but I just searched from every station on a dangling branch, as you can obviously only use two of these in a route, and their length is such that they must be included (waves hands).

The rule which says that a line can only be used in one (but either) direction is a bit of a pain with regards to using an off the shelf algorithm. Of course this is also NP complete. I noticed that adding a single extra link appears to at least double running time.

[Deleted]

Interesting

What did you write it in (out of curiosity)?

[compsci]

Plain Java. I tried rewriting in C# to see if it would run any faster as a fully compiled and linked binary, but it actually appeared to be slower.

[Deleted]

Ah right.

Sounds like a nice piece of code!

[compsci]

I usually use the development model of creating something that works, then refining until something nice eventually appears. Except that I got the answer before much refinement happened.

Also we could do with an IRC channel round here.

[Admin Team]

professorfox said:

Also we could do with an IRC channel round here.

A WHAT???

(Shows ignorance of computer techie stuff)...

Is that a) something we could do 'here' and b) would there be a demand for it?

If the concensus is 'Aye' to the above we'll explore it - though I have a feeling that compsci will have the onerous task of sorting it out.

[compsci]

You'll probably know it better by the term "Chat Room". It certainly wouldn't replace the usual conversations in this forum, but would be more useful for the "My computer has smoke coming out of it!" type of conversations, where several people end up typing at once, producing a rather messy and long thread.

As for the difficulty, the serving would probably be done by freenode.net or similar (I believe we'd fit neatly into the Forum or Blog category) then you use some client software (either on your computer or installed on a website), and chat away.

A warning though - it's very easy to become addicted to this (but I suppose we're all addicted to this forum anyway

[Colin]

In the interest of open debate, whilst a chatroom is, in lot of ways a great idea (I nearly considered approaching Dave with the idea myself), I would urge some caution about the addiction side of things.

I have two (ex) friends who use a certain chatroom on a very regular basis. Every night in fact. They think I am still friends with them - But I haven't had a decent conversation with them for 3 weeks now. Even their kids are complaining (9 & 13 yrs), other friends have commented to me that it's not worth going to their house any more and one of their mothers is even getting the hump over it.

Don't get me wrong here - I'm not saying it's a moral decision for Dave, it's up to him what he does with his site. As it is in its current form, this forum is very friendly and takes little time read through. Yes some post's can be put on at the same time saying the same thing - so what !

I spose my point is, a chatroom can be very time consuming - more so for the moderators as they would have to monitor a constant conversation, and trust me - IT WILL TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE!!!

Sorry to go on but it's about time I had a rant - I feel so much better now ;D ;D

[q8]

In the interest of open debate, whilst a chatroom is, in lot of ways a great idea (I nearly considered approaching Dave with the idea myself), I would urge some caution about the addiction side of things.

I have two (ex) friends who use a certain chatroom on a very regular basis. Every night in fact. They think I am still friends with them - But I haven't had a decent conversation with them for 3 weeks now. Even their kids are complaining (9 & 13 yrs), other friends have commented to me that it's not worth going to their house any more and one of their mothers is even getting the hump over it.

Don't get me wrong here - I'm not saying it's a moral decision for Dave, it's up to him what he does with his site. As it is in its current form, this forum is very friendly and takes little time read through. Yes some post's can be put on at the same time saying the same thing - so what !

I spose my point is, a chatroom can be very time consuming - more so for the moderators as they would have to monitor a constant conversation, and trust me - IT WILL TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE!!!

Sorry to go on but it's about time I had a rant - I feel so much better now ;D ;D
*********************************************

I will endorse and agree with every word of this post and remind folk that chat rooms are dangerous to some extent in that you can, inadvertently, give way personal information thinking you are only conversing with one friend at a time when in fact everybody in the "room" can see the talk too.

[compsci]

One of the reasons I prefer to use the technical term "IRC Channel" is because the media have created the impression that "chat rooms" are only visited by pedophiles and other people up to no good.

q8 said:

chat rooms are dangerous to some extent in that you can, inadvertently, give way personal information thinking you are only conversing with one friend at a time when in fact everybody in the "room" can see the talk too.

Just like this forum, IRC has a private messaging system for anything you don't want other people to know. At any time you can get a list of the nicknames of people who are currently in the channel - you don't talk to the entire world. Just like this forum, these nicknames can be registered so that you have a reasonably high degree of assurance that the people you're talking to are the same people as they were last time, and not some scam artists (naturally this relies on people not using stupidly simple passwords)

I would say it's probably best to ignore all the negative hype generated by the media, and to at least give the thing a go before you dismiss the possability.

[q8]

I would say it's probably best to ignore all the negative hype generated by the media, and to at least give the thing a go before you dismiss the possability.
========================================

Oh I am not dismissing the possiblity. I am just going by all the warnings you see all over the place. I have never joined a chatroom for those reasons. If people on this forum want IRC then they can have it providing DD approves. Perhaps we should hold a pole.

[piccadillypilot]

q8 said:

Perhaps we should hold a pole.

Will there be a dancer performing at the same time?
========================================

Q8 addition >>

I just spent ten minutes looking at this post thinking "What the hell is the geezer talking about" Then I looked at DD's post below and saw what it was

"Hold a Pole" ? Silly old git,. Perhaps I should sign a few Czechs while I am about it?

[Admin Team]

piccadillypilot said:

q8 said:

Perhaps we should hold a pole.

Will there be a dancer performing at the same time?

Glad to see that PP has managed to bring things down to the 'usual level'!

Thanks for the explanations on these points though, and I'm happy for the idea of a poll to test the water on the basic idea.

The only thing I'd perhaps mention though is that 'this' forum does have the facility for members to indicate if they use MSN/AOLIM etc ( and you may note that I've made public that I use both of those mediums) so is there a benefit of actually setting up something seperate? Surely the availibility of those and the ability to be selective etc etc fulfils the criteria?

Responses invited!!

[compsci]

The main difference is that MSN/AIM are primarily one to one mediums, although it is possible to have multi way conversations, and you need to explicitly decide who you wish to communicate with, then find out if they are available.

IRC on the other hand allows people to join a channel and just talk to whoever happens to be there (who presumably wish to allow such communication by their presence). This tends to be conductive to spontanious conversations.

The best real world analogy I can think of is that MSN etc are equivalent to phoning someone, while IRC is like wandering into a pub and talking to whoever is there.

[ikar]

composi- you forget on that map the Heathrow loop

[compsci]

ikar said:

composi- you forget on that map the Heathrow loop

I removed that since it can't possibly be part of the longest journey. Same with parts of the Central Line.

[ikar]

ok

[Colin]

professorfox said:

One of the reasons I prefer to use the technical term "IRC Channel" is because the media have created the impression that "chat rooms" are only visited by pedophiles and other people up to no good.

Who said anything about pedophiles ? I think you are slighty missing my point:

Facts - It can be addictive, it can be time consuming and it would mean a lot of work on the part of the admin/mods.

I think MSN is a better route.

[Phil]

IRC could be chatted about (!) at the forum meet next Saturday- whilst not conclusive it might give an idea of the thoughts of those who want to meet each other (accepting the fact that some of those not attending are prevented from doing so for some reason or other.). A straw poll perhaps (now how would Q8 dance up that ;D ;D)