Description
Overview
This assignment is to be implemented using procedural programming. These are some
general rules about what you should and should not do.
Description
This program is used to simulate the process of a crowdsourcing system, and we simplify
some steps here. The Tasks.txt and Workers.txt file save the information of individual tasks
and workers, respectively.
Each task (one line record from in Tasks.txt) represents a task which needs to be assigned to
a worker to finish. The crowdsourcing system attempts to assign the task through a list of
workers in the same line in Tasks.txt. All workers in the list will try the task in order. Each
worker has a certain number of trials. Whether this worker is successful depends on the
average performance over these trials.
The next worker can try only when the current worker fails. If the current worker y succeeds,
you should output something like “Assignment of Task x to worker y succeeds” where x is
the taskID and y is the workerID. Otherwise, output something like “Assignment of Task x to
worker y fails”.
Now, let us define the inputs in Tasks.txt and Workers.txt, ‘worker performance’ at a
time, ‘worker average performance’ and the ‘successful condition’ of a worker.
Inputs in Tasks.txt and Workers.txt:
1. Tasks.txt
Format:
taskId,description;uncertainty$difficulty%priorityLabel&workers:a list
of worker IDs
Example:
123,image labelling;5$10%1&workers:0,1
Note: the ‘priorityLabel’ shows whether this task has a high priority or not. (1 denotes
high priority and 0 denotes low priority)
2. Workers.txt
Format:
workerId,name%variability$ability;experienceLabel
Example:
0,Michael%-2$50;1
Note: the ‘experienceLabel’ shows whether this worker is senior or not. (1 denotes a
senior worker and 0 denotes an ordinary worker)
Worker Performance and her/his average performance:
The performance score is a sample drawn from a normal distribution. In this normal
distribution, “mean = worker ability – task difficulty” and “standard deviation = task
uncertainty +worker variability”. E.g, given the task and the worker in the example above.
Mean=50-10, and standard deviation=5+(-2).
The average performance is the average score of a certain number of independent draws
from this distribution plus a conditional value of 0 or 6. The number of draws is 5 if the task
has a low priority and is 10 if it is a high-priority task. The conditional value is 0 if the
worker is an ordinary worker and is 6 if the worker is senior.
To summarize, the average performance of a worker is:
The average of {5 or 10} independent performance scores drawn from a normal distribution,
plus {0 or 6}. The values in the brackets {} depend on the type of the task and the worker.
Successful condition of a worker
We say the worker is successful if and only if the average performance score is greater than
50. Otherwise (i.e., the score <= 50), it fails.
Output:
The tasks from the “Tasks.txt” file are to be processed in the order they are given, and each
task is independent. You should output the worker information and the information of each
task (i.e., all attribute information in the input file) being processed and the evaluation results
for the workers in the list (i.e., Assignment of Task x to worker y succeeds or not) into the
“Output.txt” file. Below are some sample outputs:
Submission guidelines
1. Your assignment should be organised into one zip file with name following the format
“familyname_studentId_ass1.zip”. The zip file ONLY contains three source-code files and one
README:
(a) A driver file driver.cpp containing your main() function. Meanwhile, the main()
function should be clear and concise, and should not be too large.
(b) A header file header.h containing the prototypes for the functions you write.
(c) An implementation file header.cpp containing the implementations of your
functions.
(d) In README, describe the role and content of each source-code file, and how to
run your code.
2. Suppose your executable file is called `prog`, it should only take three additional
arguments (Tasks.txt Workers.txt Output.txt) when you run the program:
$ ./prog Tasks.txt Workers.txt Output.txt
Important Notes (must read!):
1. Do not change any content in the provided files. The provided Tasks.txt and
Workers.txt help test your codes. However, content in these files used for marking
your code can be different.
2. Use structs to store information for tasks and workers.
3. Vectors are not allowed. If you really need something similar, arrays are allowed and
the size can be predefined. The number of workers and tasks during marking will be
not greater than 20.
4. Any standard input/output libraries (e.g., stringstream) can be used. You need to call
some built-in libraries to handle delimiters from the file.
5. Your project need to have good commenting, have good layout, and have concise and
self-explained codes.
6. Late submissions will be marked with a 25% deduction for each day, including days
over the weekend.
7. Submissions more than four days late will not receive marks, unless an extension has
been granted.
8. Academic misconduct is treated seriously. Any plagiarised work will be given a zero
mark and reported to the University.
