O' mighty warrior,
Thy mission is to slay the foul king of Erythea.
Thou shall find him in his realm in the south.
God bless you,
King of Isladia.
After reading the order, you know you have a long, dangerous way down to the south, to find the king of Erythea in his realm and kill him. The Erythea realm is a rectangular region, with a number of horrible strongholds in it. Impenetrable walls enclose the region, so the only way for you to enter the realm is to fly by your Pegasus (flying horse) and land in some point in the region. The hiding place of the king is known so you just need to find your way to that location. As the area is extensive and covered by different terrain types, you have to travel on the grid-like roads in the region. The problem is, there are many guards on the towers of strongholds who can see you, and once seen, you have no chance to see your family again! The closer you travel to the strongholds, the greater the chances to be seen by the guards. The problem is to find the safest way from the point your Pegasus lands to the point where the king is.
More abstractly, you have an m * n grid with squares of the same size, denoting the realm and the roads in it. You can travel along the lines in the grid (roads), and at each intersection (road crossing) you may turn into another road. Assume each stronghold comprises a set of adjacent squares of the grid (Figure 1). As you cannot enter a stronghold, your path never intersects the interior of a stronghold, yet you can travel on a road which is on stronghold boundaries (Figure 2). Suppose you can land your Pegasus exactly on a road crossing (the source point - S in Figure 1) and the hiding place of the king is on another road crossing (the destination point - D in Figure 1). Neither of these points lie inside a stronghold but may be placed on a stronghold boundary (as D does in Figure 1). Each road crossing is assigned a risk level which depends on the shortest road distance from the crossing to a point of the grid which is on the boundary of a stronghold. For a road crossing with the shortest road distance d to a boundary of strongholds, the risk level equals to m + n - d (Figure 3). It is assumed that
there is at least one stronghold in the region, so that the definition of risk level is well-defined. The problem is, given the region's map and the source and destination points, find the path from the source to the destination which lies on the grid lines, so that sum of the risk levels of the points on the path (including source and destination) be minimum. As stated before, the path cannot intersect the interior of a stronghold.
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Figure 1. An 8 * 6 region.
You can travel along the grid lines (including boundary lines).
The shaded squares are strongholds. | Figure 2. (a) Traveling on the boundary of a stronghold is allowed.
(b) Crossing a stronghold is not allowed.
| Figure 3. Point P in a 5*6 grid has distance 3 from stronghold A and distance 2 from stronghold B. Thus, risk level of P is (5+6)-2 = 9. |