Programming Assignment Checklist: Atomic Nature of Matter

Green font below indicates an update to this file since it was made available. The last change was made on Dec. 28.


Frequently Asked Questions

How do I read in the .jpg files? Use our Picture.java data type, described in Section 3.1 of the textbook. To see it in action, program Threshold.java takes the name of a picture file as a command line argument, displays it on the screen, converts all pixels to grayscale, and displays all those pixels with a grayscale value ≥ 180 in white. It relies on the helper program Luminance.java (Program 3.1.3) to convert from color to grayscale.

Are diagonal pixels considered adjacent? No, use only the 4 ordinal neighbors (N, E, S, and W).

What should I do if several of the beads in frame t+1 have the same bead in frame t as their closest bead? That's a theoretical possibility. But it's fine to ignore here since the beads aren't supposed to get too close. If they do get close, there's no good way to track them anyway.

My physics is a bit rusty. Do I need to worry about converting units? No, we have provided all of the constant in SI units. The only conversion you should need to do is to convert from distances measured in pixels (the radial displacements) to distances measured in meters using the conversion factor of 0.175 × 10-6 meters per pixel.

Will all of the frames be 640-by-480? Will all of the runs be comprised of 200 runs? Yes, yes. However, do not hardwire any of these constants into your program. Instead use picture.width() and picture.height() for the width and height, and use args.length for the number of command-line arguments.

How do I specify the 200 image names on the command line? One way is to type them all in.

% java BeadTracker run_1/frame00000.jpg run_1/frame00001.jpg run_1/frame00002.jpg ...
An easier alternative is to use the wildcard capability of your command-line. Assuming you want to use all JPEG files in the run_1 directory, you can use the following.
% java BeadTracker run_1/*.jpg
The file names get automatically expanded in alphabetical order, as desired.

Is there a way to make the toString() method format numbers in a nice way? Yes. String.format() works like System.out.printf(), but returns the resulting string instead of printing it. Here is our toString() method in Bead.

public String toString() {
    return String.format("%2d (%8.4f, %8.4f)", mass, cx, cy);
}

How long should my program take? It depends on the speed of your computer. Ours takes about 30 seconds to process a set of 200 frames.

How much memory should my program use? Ours uses less than 5m. You may be using substantially more if you are keeping more than 1 picture open at a time.

How accurate of an estimate should I get? You should get within 10% or so of the exact value for Avogadro's number (6.022142 × 1023). The standard deviation of the radius of the beads is about 10%, so you shouldn't expect results more accurate than that.

Input, Output, and Testing

Testing. Test your main() methods in BeadFinder, BeadTracker, and Avogadro.

Submission

Use the following readme file template.

Possible Progress Steps

These are purely suggestions for how you might make progress. You do not have to follow these steps.

Enrichment

What is polystyrene? It's an inexpensive plastic that is used in many everyday things including plastic forks, drinking cups, and the case of your desktop computer. Styrofoam is a popular brand of polystyrene foam. Computational biologists use micron size polystyrene beads (aka microspheres, latex beads) to "capture" a single DNA molecule, e.g., for a DNA test.

What's the history of measuring Avogadro's number? In 1811, Avogadro hypothesized that the number of molecules in a liter of gas at a given temperature and pressure is the same for all gases. Unfortunately, he was never able to determine this number that would later be named after him. Johann Josef Loschmidt, an Austrian physicist, gave the first estimate for this number using the kinetic gas theory. In some places, this number is known as Loschmidt's number. In 1873 Maxwell estimated the number of be around 4.3 × 1023; later Kelvin estimated it to be around 5 × 1023. Perrin gave the first "accurate" estimate (6.5 - 6.8 × 1023) of, what he coined, Avogadro's number. Here's a reference on estimating Avogadro's number. The most accurate estimates for Avogradro's number and Boltzmann's constant are computed using x-ray crystallography: Avogadro's number is approximately 6.022142 × 1023; Boltzmann's constant is approximately 1.3806503 × 10-23 J K-1.



Intro to Computer Science
wayne@cs.princeton.edu