Monotonic Stack: Conference Room Visibility

• Programming Assignment 3 focuses on determining how many people have an unobstructed view of a speaker in a conference room setup
• The conference room has chairs arranged in an N x P rectangle and event planners want to ensure shorter audience members can see the speaker, even with taller people in front
• Help is requested to determine candidate seat assignments, provided in a text file with N lines, each having P entries representing the heights of people assigned to seats

Problem Solving with Stacks

• A monotonic stack is crucial for solving the problem. It is a stack where elements are either monotonically increasing or decreasing from bottom to top
• Duplicate values are not allowed
• The "push" function differs from traditional stacks by ensuring values remain in the correct order. In an increasing stack, values larger than the new value are popped before pushing
• Other stack operations remain the same

Implementation Details

• A templated monotonic stack must be built and called MonoStack. It is based on array-based stack
• The constructor takes an initial stack size and a character o as parameters
• When o is 'i', the stack is monotonically increasing, 'd' indicates decreasing
• The implementation should handle error conditions appropriately for stack methods

"One Way Only"

• "Monotonic" means that the stack must maintain a consistent increasing or decreasing order from bottom to top

Program Requirements

• SpeakerView Class: A SpeakerView class building is required. It takes a plain text file with N+2 lines.
• The first line is “BEGIN,” the last line is “END,” and the N lines in between consist of P doubles (heights) separated by spaces
• The program employs a monotonically decreasing stack to count visible people in each column and their heights
• The output should be descriptive and displayed to the terminal

Main File

• A main.cpp must be built that takes the input file as a command line argument and computes the output using the SpeakerView class

Restrictions

• Non-primitive data structures (vectors, lists, etc.) cannot be used, apart from your own monotonic stack implementation
• The assignment must be completed individually using VSCode, ensuring the code runs correctly with g++ using a course docker container

Code Integrity

• External C++ IO operations can be used, but must be cited in a README file
• All code must be original

Submission Details

• The assignment is due on the specified day and time on Canvas
• Submit all commented code as a zip file named LastName_FirstInitial_A3.zip

Grading Criteria

• Grades are based on correctness, following guidelines, and code quality, including meaningful comments
• An elegant, object-oriented solution will receive more credit
• C++ standard style guide must be followed (refer to the course page on Canvas)
• Code not following specifications will receive a 25% deduction and code not compiling results in a 50% deduction

Readme File Requirements

• A README file must accompany all source code
• The README file should include your full name, student ID, Chapman email, course number and section, and assignment number

Additional Information in Readme

• A list of all source files submitted
• Any known compile or runtime errors, code limitations, or deviations from the specification
• A list of references used
• Instructions for running your assignment (compiling with g++ *.cpp -o A1.exe and running with ./A1.exe input.txt output.html)

In-Code Citations

• Small, isolated lines of code from external sources are allowed with appropriate citations
• Copied code must be wrapped in comments indicating the source, including the link/name of the source
• All source files should start with a header comment containing full name, student ID, Chapman email, course number and section, and assignment number, each on a new line