The lazy ahh student

Solving this medium C++ routing optimization problem

This is a medium-difficulty coding problem that tests your ability to find an optimal tour through a small set of waypoints. The constraint that you must visit every location exactly once, combined with a small upper bound on the number of tasks, hints at a brute-force or dynamic-programming approach rather than a greedy heuristic.

The core challenge is exploring the solution space efficiently: with up to 8 tasks, the number of possible orderings is manageable, but you need to compute Euclidean distances accurately and compare routes systematically. A well-structured solution will clearly separate the distance calculation, permutation generation, and aggregation logic, making it easy to verify correctness on edge cases like empty task lists or collinear points.

• Permutation enumeration and backtracking
• Floating-point arithmetic and distance computation
• State-space search with manageable branching factor
• Handling boundary conditions (no tasks, start equals end)