CSCI160 Project: Character Timeline Anomalies

The project is intended to give students a chance to design and develop a somewhat larger program on their own, rather than following the rather structured design and implementation approaches given for smaller problems in the labs. 

Note: it is possible (perhaps even probable) that we will find some ambiguities or omissions in the project specifications. If this should occur, corrections will be posted as soon as possible and a note will be placed here outlining the changes. Please check back periodically for updates. 

The specifications for the project (given below) detail the required behaviour for the project, but students are free to go beyond those requirements, and have much greater latitude for creativity. Your code must still adhere to the 160 code standards, but the design and implementation is otherwise left up to the student. 

The project is due at 9pm on December 10th, and subject to the same late penalties as the course labs. To obtain the project repository (where all your project work will be carried out and which you will need in order to submit), we'll follow a process similar to that used in the labs: From your home directory in your linux account, run the command make -f make160 csci160/project Within your csci160/project directory you will find a project.cpp file and a makefile. All your project code must be in the project.cpp file. 

Submission of the project must be done using make submit which must be done from within the project repository (just like with the labs) - no other form of submission will be accepted. Specifications The project this semester is to create a program that checks for timeline anomalies in character births and deaths. Suppose we have a game in which many NPC characters are born and die during the course of the game, and that the game keeps track of each of these events. Now suppose that time travel is rare but possible within the game universe - thus some NPCs can die "before" they are born. Now let's add one more complication: there is an alternate universe with some limited crossover possible between the two (apologies, I just realized this sounds terribly Marvel-y). Our program is just concerned with examining the births/dcaths in the two universes, looking for anomalies - characters who death date is earlier than their birth date within a timeline, and characters who are born in one universe but die in the other. 

The user input for the program will just be a series of descriptions of births and deaths, with the following exact format for each entry:

• the date, expressed using a real number for the year, e.g. 2021.835 (we'll assume no two events take place at the exact same time)

• the name of the universe, either "original" or "alternate"

• tither the word "birth" or "death" to signify the kind of event

• the unique name of the character as a single word, with underscores in place of whitespacc, e.g. "Doc_]" (we'll pretend no other character in either universe has the same exact name) 

The user input will be provided in order by date (strictly increasing), and after the very last event the user will enter the string *END_OF_TIMEN. Once the program has read the °E.ND_OF TIME" string, it will display a list of all the anomalies found: identifying which cases involved crossovers between the two universes and which involved time anomalies. (Note that it's possible for a case to be both: someone travels backward in time and switches universes.)