[smitty1199]

Hello Everyone,

I've been trying to craft a Manhattan distance function in Python.
However, it seems quite straight forward but I am having trouble.

Can anyone help me out with Manhattan distance metric written in Python?

Thanks in advance,

Smitty

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Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

[smitty1199]

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

[Dan]

Hey Smitty,

I've only ever done the Manhattan distance in C/C++ (for an A* Search, if memory serves). However, if you could post what you have so far, I may be able to point you in the right direction.

It really is quite a simple alg; all you want to do is get the difference of the x and y co-ordinates, in a sort of right-angle walk approach. So, say you were at (15,20) and you wanted to get the distance to (35,40), you would do (35-15) + (40-20), giving you a distance of 40.

So, a pseudo approach would be:
Let curr.x = 15, curr.y = 20;
Let dest.x = 35, dest.y = 40;

man_dist = ((dest.x - curr.x) + (dest.y - curr.y))

At least, thats how I remember the Manhattan distance. I could be wrong; it has been some time

Like I said, show us your code and we may be able to walk you through it.

[smitty1199]

Here's my start....

Any suggestions?
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#This operation returns the Manhattan distance.
#
def getManhattan(xList,yList):

return float(xList[0]-yList[0])+ abs(xList[1]-yList[1])
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[Dan]

Hey Smitty,

Is xList a list of all of your x co-ords, and yList a list of all of your y co-ords? And you only want to ever get the distance between the first and second point (0 and 1)?

If so, try this:

#This operation returns the Manhattan distance.
#
def getManhattan(xList,yList):

return float(xList[0]-xList[1]) + abs(yList[0]-yList[1])

As a note here, you may need to swap the 1 and 0 around, depending on how you are storing points. I would expect xList[1]-xList[0] + yList[1]-yList[0] to be closer to what you need, but I'm not sure how exactly you are storing points, so I can't be 100% certain.