NYC Subway Challenge
Information Technology & Services - Troy, New York, United States
NYC Subway Challenge Employees
NYC Subway Challenge Senior Management
NYC Subway Challenge Details
A student-run, cross-university, open source project at RPI & Columbia University.In association with the Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS).We aim to develop a program to find an optimal or semi-optimal route through all 472 NYC subway stations to set the corresponding world record.Building a linked list representation of the subway system in accordance with data assembled from the MTA and Google Maps' API. This data is gathered, analyzed and formatted using Python and SQL. This data includes names, index numbers, timetables, subway lines, neighbors, time to neighbors, latitude and longitude for each given station. Neighbors will be limited to those stations one stop away on a common local or express subway line but also extend to stations located within a certain radius and hence deemed "walkable". Google maps' API is used to find the time to walk from a station to all its walkable neighbors. In the absence of appropriate data from the MTA, Google Maps is also used to determine the length of a subway trip between two given stops. A range of path finding algorithms are being considered and implemented including A*, BFS and Dijkstra's. The completed program will print out an optimal route. All code and data will be made publicly available with a permissive open source license. At the project's conclusion, interested project members will take a trip to New York to formally set the world record associated with the Subway Challenge.
