CSC274b
Spring 2000
Ileana Streinu
Reading 1
Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2000
Due: Thursday, Feb. 3, 2000
Goals
- To become familiar with Computational Geometry applications
before getting deeper into theoretical concepts.
- To learn how to use library and web resources.
- To test the class accounts on grendel/hermite.
- To start a web page for class work, where all significant
assignment solutions
in electronic format will be linked to.
Deadline
Thursday, Feb. 3, 2000.
To submit
- An email to me, confirming you could access the class
account.
- A home page in the class account (minimal).
- A short summary in HTML format summarizing the assigned
reading and search work
(see below).
What
First, create an HTML page named home.html in the public_html directory
of your assigned 274b-xx class account. It should contain your
name, links to relevant personal pages and email address(es) and
back to the 274b class home page. From time to time I will ask
you to write a short paper in HTML format, search for bibliographical
references or do web searches on Computational Geometry
topics. We might even do some Java applets.
All this work should later appear linked from this page.
As a first assignment, to make sure everybody knows HTML and can
write a simple HTML page, I will ask you to write a short "paper"
(one page) summarizing the assigned reading, as well as
web and bibliographical
searches, as detailed below.
The book Computational Geometry: Algorithms and
Applications by M. de Berg et al. is on reserve in the Bass
Science Library. You can check it out for no more than two
hours. You can copy the 1-2 pages relevant to your assignment, if
you prefer so.
The book is organized as a sequence of chapters, each
starting with the description of an application of a
Computational Geometry problem, followed by the relevant theory
and algorithms. Your task is to browse through the book, read the
first paragraphs from a few chapters that seem to attract you the most
(except chapters 1 and 3),
then choose one problem (corresponding to one chapter) and read
the introductory description. Your task is to understand what the
problem is about - not the solution that is subsequently
described in that chapter.
The summary that you have to produce for this assignment
should consist of
- a brief description of the problem (in your own
words!)
- a glossary of geometric terms that you have encountered
in this reading (specifying whether you are familiar with them or
not)
- one or two words which you consider the key-words best
describing the problem
- and, at the end, append the results of:
- A web search based on those keybords - a few links that you
found relevant (can include links to more general computational geometry
pages that you came across, if the keywords didn't
produce anything interesting).
- A bibliographic search in the
Computational Geometry
bibliography database based on that or those keywords. To access
the Computational Geometry web accessible database(s), follow the
link to
Bookmarks from the class home
page, or go directly to
Geombib WWW search pages
from Barcelona.
- The total time spent on this assignment (I won't ask you to
do this too often, but right now I need to get an idea of how
spread your general abilities are).
As an example, if I were to do this for Chapter 3 (which,
as you see, is the topic of my lectures for the first week of
classes - at least!), some chosen keywords would be: art gallery,
triangulation, partitioning, polygon. I would search the web and the
geometry database on these keywords and paste into the HTML page
some of these findings which I would find relevant.
Estimated Time (at most)
- Going to library, reading, taking notes: 2 hours.
- Writing the summary: one hour.
- Web page creation, typing: one hour.
- Web search: 15-30 minutes.
- Bibliography search: 15-30 minutes.
Total: 5 hours.
Last modified January 23, 2000.