[Rails-devel] 18xx Rails: Feature Request 1517702 - automatic route calculation

[Frederick W. <fre...@go...>]

Hi developers,

I was wondering why this feature is prioritized so low. For me, this would
be THE reason to use the computer instead of a physical board.

Is it that you need a good algorithm before implementing this? In such a
case, please consider the following:
(1) Even though the brute force algorithm wouldn't be in O(n^p), it will
probably be ok for non-diesel runs.
(2) What SimTex's 1830 (most probably) does: A separate model (multi-edge
graph) for route calculation is updated whenever someone lays a tile. By
doing this, you get a very low constant factor of the time the algorithm
needs, meaning you'll still have exponential time but you won't perceive
this until the size of the graph becomes very large.

What do you think about that?

Best Regards,
Frederick