Vfrdtyky

You work for a company that sells robots that move around a factory floor in a grid like pattern. Your boss has asked you to write a program that will test how many unique squares a robot visits given a set of instructions.
For example the input N4,E2,S2,W4 (described below) should result in a value of 11.
The robot starts at position 1, heads north for four blocks, east for two blocks, south for two and west for four. During those steps it visits blocks 1-12 once except for block 2 which it visits twice. Block 2 should only be counted once. The size of the grid is unknown and not given in the input.
I have tried the below but is not getting unique values.I also want a way to get the input in the formart N4,E2,S2,W4 not with separate prompts for direction.

static void Main(string args)

{

    int x1 = 0;

    int y1 = 0;



    int x2 = 0;

    int y2 = 0;



    int x3 = 0;

    int y3 = 0;



    int x4 = 0;

    int y4 = 0;







    int N, S, E, W, Total;

    string coordinate1, coordinate2, coordinate3, coordinate4;





    Console.Write("Enter North : ");

    N = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());



    if(N != 0)

    {

        x1 += 0;

        y1 += N;



    }

    coordinate1 = "(" + x1 + "," + y1 + ")";

















    Console.Write("Enter East: ");

    E = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());



    if (E != 0)

    {

        y3 += 0;

        x3 += E;



    }

    coordinate3 = "(" + x3 + "," + y3 + ")";







    Console.Write("Enter South: ");

    S = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());



    if (S != 0)

    {

        x2 += 0;

        y2 -= S;



    }



    coordinate2 = "(" + x2 + "," + y2 + ")";





    Console.Write("Enter West: ");

    W = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine());



    if (W != 0)

    {

        y4 += 0;

        x4 -= W;



    }

    coordinate4 = "(" + x4 + "," + y4 + ")";









    if (coordinate1 == coordinate2|| coordinate1== coordinate3 || coordinate1 == coordinate4 || coordinate2 == coordinate3 || coordinate2 == coordinate4 || coordinate3 ==coordinate4 )

    {

        Total = (N + S + E + W) - 1 ;

        Console.WriteLine("The total Blocks travelled are " + Total);

    }



    else

    {

        Total = N + S + E + W;

        Console.WriteLine("The total Blocks travelled are " + Total);

    }







}

This is clearly a homework exercise so I will not provide any code in this answer, only an explanation on how to approach it.

So, since the floor is a grid with unknown size, you must assume an infinite graph where your robot starts at (0,0):

       N

       |

       |

W------+------E

       |

       |

       S

Now, each step the robot takes in each direction it lends on a point in the graph - say the instructions are N4 - you add the points (1,0), (2,0), (3,0),(4,0) to your already existing (0,0) point. Then you move E2 - add (4,1) and (4,2) to the collection of points. Next S5 so you add (3,2), (2,2) (1, 2), (0, 2), (-1, 2) to the collection and so on. Each direction only changes one coordinate. Then all you have to do is count the number of the distinct coordinates and you're done.

Hint: For this exercise you might want to only collect the distinct points (you can use a HashSet for this), but when designing a software you must think beyond current requirements since customers rarely know what they want and even more what they actually need. In this case, you better collect all the points even if they are duplicates and even if this is not needed for this specific task, because the next exercise might very well be to recreate the instruction based on the robot's path, and for that it would be easier to rebuild it from the full set of coordinates. On that note, you would want to save the points in a collection that provides index based access like a List.