You don’t have a road map, to start with.
You’re ONLY given a list of cities and the distances between some of them.
From that list, draw a map. That is not a trivial task.
Okay, that makes more sense then. Maybe you should have referred to an imaginary land (instead of the US), so as not to imply people already know what it looks like from above.
Here’s an equivalent problem that may make more sense: you have a group of soldiers on a battlefield without access to GPS equipment, and they need to figure out where they are in relation to each other… they each have radios, and can measure propagation latency between each other, telling them linear distance separating each of them, but telling them nothing about directionality, and from that data they need to construct a map of their locations.
You don’t have a road map, to start with. You’re ONLY given a list of cities and the distances between some of them. From that list, draw a map. That is not a trivial task.
Okay, that makes more sense then. Maybe you should have referred to an imaginary land (instead of the US), so as not to imply people already know what it looks like from above.
Here’s an equivalent problem that may make more sense: you have a group of soldiers on a battlefield without access to GPS equipment, and they need to figure out where they are in relation to each other… they each have radios, and can measure propagation latency between each other, telling them linear distance separating each of them, but telling them nothing about directionality, and from that data they need to construct a map of their locations.