COSC 326 Carpets

COSC 326 
Carpets
Your great aunt Maude has, over the years, acquired a large collection of strips of carpet
squares. She wants to start a business of sewing them together into larger carpets for
sale. Of course people’s tastes differ so the criteria that make a carpet desirable can also
change depending on the customer or type of carpet. You’ll be trying to satisfy customer demand as well as you possibly can from the stock of material available.
In any given scenario, you will have a supply of some number of strips of differently
coloured squares, all of the same length. For instance you might have:
You will make carpets by sewing these strips together along their long sides. The criteria you need to satisfy will vary. It might be strictly forbidden to have two squares of the
same colour sewn together. Or, it might be desirable to have as many such coincidences
as possible or the best possible balance between coincidences and differences.
The trouble is that you don’t know in advance what a customer will ask for, so you
need to leave dear Maude with a working program into which she can enter:
• her current stock of carpet pieces,
• the carpet size requested, and
• the criteria for judging a carpet’s aesthetics.
The program will then tell her which items of stock to use and how to fit them together.
Detailed requirements are included in the task description below.
Task
Write a program makeCarpet which takes as input from stdin a stock of carpet pieces
represented as lines of characters, each line of the same length. Use a command line
argument to give the size of carpet desired (a positive integer equal to the number of
pieces to be used) and a command line flag to represent the type. You must support the
following options:
-n No matches allowed (output, a suitable carpet, or “not possible”)
-m Maximum possible number of matches (output, a proposed solution followed by
the number of matches on the next line)
-b Best balance between matches and non-matches (output, a proposed solution followed by the absolute value of the difference between the number of matches
and non-matches)
(3 points, Group)