#159 Express coffee
The streets of New Addleton are set out in a rectangular grid. Seven coffee vendors (the circles in the diagram above) have stalls at metro stations and want to set up a central depot to collect supplies from each morning. They want to minimise their combined cycling distance from stall to depot. Pat has four candidates for the depot location: A, B, C and D.
“Are you sure one of those four is optimal?” asks Shahin. “I suppose we could work out the total vendor-depot distance for every point on the grid.”
“No need, I can tell you the best place just by…
