Algorithm, can someone please help?
You work for the emergency preparedness Center and your lastest project is to develop a system to deploy people to local hospitals in the event of a volcanic explosion at Mount Rain. The main task in such an emergency situation is that ambulances will be deployed to pick up injured people and deliver them to nearby hospitals. There are k hospitals in the region and n injured people. For medical reasons you have determined that a person must be taken to a hospital that is within a 15 minute drive from where they were picked up. Also, you don;t want to overload any one hospital so you want to take at most n/k patients to each hospital.
Give a polynomial time algorithm that takes the given information about the injured people’s locations and the locations of the hospitals and determines whether there is a way to distribute the patients to the area hospitals so that no single hospital is overloaded.
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Without considering the rebad questions will not generateasonableness or real-worldness of the problem, you’ve ignored some critical variables. 1. Population density. 2. ‘deploy people to local hospitals…’ - as in delivery to ER? or ensuring adequate staffing at the hospitals? 3. you seem to have combined a transportation problem (assuming that the ambulances can traverse the roads to even deliver ANYONE to a hospital within 15 minutes) with a load distribution problem. You don’t need help, you need to think. Carefully, rationally, and clearly. The problem statement, as presented, does not show clarity and barely suggests rationality. Reframe the inputs in such a way that you can easily separate your assumptions (i.e., independent variables) from your goals (dependent variables). Also, verify that in fact a ‘polynomial time’ format is correct, without making additional assumptions or reducing the number of dependent variables.
The hardest piece to solve is that, for any given individual, what is the travel time to any of the hospitals in the region, without making assumptions of location. You are describing a regional impact, not a single point impact. The problem statement is too out of control to be solved, as framed.
Sorry, but the premise is seriously flawed. When a volcano explodes, it sends out a shower of ash and pumice. Folks are injured primarily by breathing the ash, which is comprised of fine, glass-like shards that lacerate the lungs.
What fool plans to take the injured to the nearest local hospital that is also likely to be subject to the ash fall?
In short, when a volcano is injuring people, GET THEM OUT!
…..
Ya know, this reminds me of another algorithm, a very simple one. Can you answer this?
There are seven crows sitting on the roof of a barn. You shoot one off the roof. How many are left?