A problem with connected points and determining geometry figures based on points' location analysis

Posted by StolePopov on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by StolePopov
Published on 2010-03-19T21:14:58Z Indexed on 2010/03/19 21:21 UTC
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In school we have a really hard problem, and still no one from the students has solved it yet. Take a look at the picture below:

http://d.imagehost.org/0422/mreza.gif

That's a kind of a network of connected points, which doesn't end and each point has its own number representing it. Let say the numbers are like this: 1-23-456-78910-etc. etc.. (You can't see the number 5 or 8,9... on the picture but they are there and their position is obvious, the point in middle of 4 and 6 is 5 and so on).

1 is connected to 2 and 3, 2 is connected to 1,3,5 and 4 etc.

The numbers 1-2-3 indicate they represent a triangle on the picture, but the numbers 1-4-6 do not because 4 is not directly connected with 6.

Let's look at 2-3-4-5, that's a parallelogram (you know why), but 4-6-7-9 is NOT a parallelogram because the in this problem there's a rule which says all the sides must be equal for all the figures - triangles and parallelograms.

Also there are hexagons, for ex. 4-5-7-9-13-12 is a hexagon - all sides must be equal here too.

12345 - that doesn't represent anything, so we ignore it.

I think i explained the problem well. The actual problem which is given to us by using an input of numbers like above to determine if that's a triangle/parallelogram/hexagon(according to the described rules).

For ex:

1 2 3 - triangle
11 13 24 26 -parallelogram
1 2 3 4 5 - nothing
11 23 13 25 - nothing
3 2 5 - triangle

I was reading computational geometry in order to solve this, but i gave up quickly, nothing seems to help here. One friend told me this site so i decided to give it a try.

If you have any ideas about how to solve this, please reply, you can use pseudo code or c++ whatever. Thank you very much.

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