Algo/code to cover a rectangular area using circles

[iPrank]

iPrank! long time no see

Posting this in the math forum would also be a good idea. jemidiah goes there often and he's very good for these sort of questions.

Hi! It is nice to see old friens like you and Shaggy. Ah! Those good old days! :sigh:
Last few years I got real busy with my day job. After returning home, didn't have time & energy to do VBF.
Recently I've quit my job and started full-time freelanceing/consulting. Hopefully now I'll have time to spam VBF once again.

I HATE math. (Imagine 'HATE' in Arial Black, 100pt, Bold)
But, I think this might be a good idea.

If I've understood the question, it shouldn't be too hard to do it iteratively. I assume your original radius of 15 is in pixel units, though it doesn't have to be.

Imagine you start with a solid red rectangle the same size as your actual map. You paint circles on it centred on the weather stations. Are there any red pixels left? If so, expand the radius in steps of, say, 2 pixels until there are no red pixels left.

I don't mean it actually has to be done visually. The solid red rectangle could just be a List(Of Point) representing red pixels on the screen. You could add all the circles to a Drawing2D.GraphicsPath, and then use the GraphicsPath.IsVisible(Point) to check what points are covered. Those that are can be removed from the List, until the list count reaches zero.

Anyway, am I getting warm? Does it sound like the kind of thing you need?

BB

Excellent. I LIKE your idea.
Instead of checking each pixel/list menber, can you suggest a faster idea to check unique colors in a image / Graphics ?
(NOT using GetPixel and LockBits - they will be very slow for this job.)
Probably some way to get the colormap ?

Hmm.....
I don't get the idea of using circels. For example if you use a 1D map, just a graph, with some data points, you use a curve fitting algo to create a continues curve.
So I quess you need a 2D curve fitting algo.

I don't understand. Please explain.