longest journey in tunnel

Are there any open sections from Victoria to Tower Hill?.....................Yes several.

I was thinking of a "Troglodyte Challenge". It might have interesting effects on the participants.

It was actually a really dodgy kludge involving exhaustive depth first search, disabling lines once they are used, and then backtracking when there are no routes left out of a station. In theory you'd have to do this from every station on the map, but I just searched from every station on a dangling branch, as you can obviously only use two of these in a route, and their length is such that they must be included (waves hands).

The rule which says that a line can only be used in one (but either) direction is a bit of a pain with regards to using an off the shelf algorithm. Of course this is also NP complete. I noticed that adding a single extra link appears to at least double running time.

Plain Java. I tried rewriting in C# to see if it would run any faster as a fully compiled and linked binary, but it actually appeared to be slower.

I usually use the development model of creating something that works, then refining until something nice eventually appears. Except that I got the answer before much refinement happened.

Also we could do with an IRC channel round here.

You'll probably know it better by the term "Chat Room". It certainly wouldn't replace the usual conversations in this forum, but would be more useful for the "My computer has smoke coming out of it!" type of conversations, where several people end up typing at once, producing a rather messy and long thread.

As for the difficulty, the serving would probably be done by freenode.net or similar (I believe we'd fit neatly into the Forum or Blog category) then you use some client software (either on your computer or installed on a website), and chat away.

A warning though - it's very easy to become addicted to this (but I suppose we're all addicted to this forum anyway

In the interest of open debate, whilst a chatroom is, in lot of ways a great idea (I nearly considered approaching Dave with the idea myself), I would urge some caution about the addiction side of things.

I have two (ex) friends who use a certain chatroom on a very regular basis. Every night in fact. They think I am still friends with them - But I haven't had a decent conversation with them for 3 weeks now. Even their kids are complaining (9 & 13 yrs), other friends have commented to me that it's not worth going to their house any more and one of their mothers is even getting the hump over it.

Don't get me wrong here - I'm not saying it's a moral decision for Dave, it's up to him what he does with his site. As it is in its current form, this forum is very friendly and takes little time read through. Yes some post's can be put on at the same time saying the same thing - so what !

I spose my point is, a chatroom can be very time consuming - more so for the moderators as they would have to monitor a constant conversation, and trust me - IT WILL TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE!!!

Sorry to go on but it's about time I had a rant - I feel so much better now ;D ;D
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I will endorse and agree with every word of this post and remind folk that chat rooms are dangerous to some extent in that you can, inadvertently, give way personal information thinking you are only conversing with one friend at a time when in fact everybody in the "room" can see the talk too.

I would say it's probably best to ignore all the negative hype generated by the media, and to at least give the thing a go before you dismiss the possability.
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Oh I am not dismissing the possiblity. I am just going by all the warnings you see all over the place. I have never joined a chatroom for those reasons. If people on this forum want IRC then they can have it providing DD approves. Perhaps we should hold a pole.

Glad to see that PP has managed to bring things down to the 'usual level'!

Thanks for the explanations on these points though, and I'm happy for the idea of a poll to test the water on the basic idea.

The only thing I'd perhaps mention though is that 'this' forum does have the facility for members to indicate if they use MSN/AOLIM etc ( and you may note that I've made public that I use both of those mediums) so is there a benefit of actually setting up something seperate? Surely the availibility of those and the ability to be selective etc etc fulfils the criteria?

Responses invited!!

composi- you forget on that map the Heathrow loop

ok