Building a Space Station
Description
You are a member of the space station engineering team, and are assigned a task in the construction process of the station. You are expected to write a computer program to complete the task.
The space station is made up with a number of units, called cells. All cells are sphere-shaped, but their sizes are not necessarily uniform. Each cell is fixed at its predetermined position shortly after the station is successfully put into its orbit. It is quite strange that two cells may be touching each other, or even may be overlapping. In an extreme case, a cell may be totally enclosing another one. I do not know how such arrangements are possible.
All the cells must be connected, since crew members should be able to walk from any cell to any other cell. They can walk from a cell A to another cell B, if, (1) A and B are touching each other or overlapping, (2) A and B are connected by a `corridor’, or (3) there is a cell C such that walking from A to C, and also from B to C are both possible. Note that the condition (3) should be interpreted transitively.
You are expected to design a configuration, namely, which pairs of cells are to be connected with corridors. There is some freedom in the corridor configuration. For example, if there are three cells A, B and C, not touching nor overlapping each other, at least three plans are possible in order to connect all three cells. The first is to build corridors A-B and A-C, the second B-C and B-A, the third C-A and C-B. The cost of building a corridor is proportional to its length. Therefore, you should choose a plan with the shortest tot