Help with an algorithm wanted

Russell E. Owen rowen at
Fri Jun 28 18:35:05 CEST 2002

>So effectively you have a conversion graph, where each vertex
>represents a known representation, and each edge represents a
>conversion (presumably with a conversion function as an annotation to
>the edge).
>What you are asking for appears to be an algorthm to find the shortest
>path between to representations in the graph.  Fortunately for you,
>Dijkstra provided a solution to this problem a number of years ago,
>and implementing it is a standard algorthms assignment (I do hope
>you're not asking for help with a homework assignment?).
>You'll find an implementation in the Python Cookbook @
>The recipie was submitted by David Eppstein.  It dosn't look
>optimised, but that's ok because it is legible (much more important)
>and the algorithm is efficient.

Thank you very much for the pointer. My problem is exactly one of 
converting data to different representations. In my case I am dealing 
with targets for a telescope that may be in FK5, ICRS, Galactic, 
Apparent Geocentric, Apparent Topocentric... coordinates. It's not a 
homework assignment, but is for a telescope control GUI I'm working on. 
The code will be available to others, probably being served at my web 
site <>. (I serve all my utility 
routines there, but the internals of the user interface I consider not 
of general interest, so I only send that by request. I suspect this code 
will end up in the former category, but I can't be sure until I finish 
modularizing and writing it.)

Finding the shortest path isn't an issue, because the path between any 
two representations will always be unique. Still, anything that can find 
a shortest path can find a unique path. I'll definitely have a look at 
the recipe.

The main thing I'm worried about is once I have a solution, how best to 
implement on object that implements it. I'm afraid that might not make 
much sense, but I hope it's clear from another posting I made with a 
solution to the problem. That solution is definitely not optimised but I 
hope it is legible.


-- Russell

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