The purpose of this assignment is to learn about designing and implementing an algorithm animation. You will be developing an algorithm animation using the Polka animation system. Polka is located in the directory /net/ag20/softviz/polka. It has an animation subdirectory (Anims) that has numerous examples. Play around with some of these existing animations to get a feel for what they are like. Also, browse the program source and animation code of these examples to help you with your own programming. There is also a Doc subdirectory with documentation.
For this assignment, you are allowed to choose the algorithm that you will animate. Some possibilities are sorts (quicksort, shellsort, heapsort, etc.), dynamic programming algorithms, computational geometry algorithms, graph algorithms (minimum spanning tree, shortest path, searching, etc.), greedy algorithms, and so on. Other faculty may even have algorithm ideas. The key thing to me is that you do something creative and new. Don't just "knock-off" some code from an existing animation. Be creative!!! I'm going to be looking for very thorough, well-thought out and designed animations, particularly due to the longer period of time you have to work on the assignment. If you have doubts about the algorithm or animation you're using, please run it by me and I'll be glad to provide early feedback.
To develop your animation, create your own subdirectory and then copy the Makefile from the polka Anims directory into your directory. Make sure you use the /usr/local/lang/CC C++ compiler.