Most isolated city
Find the city whose population is less than 100,000 (or some other
threshold) and whose closest city with a population over
100,000 is furthest away. What happens as you change the population threshold? Note that
this computation could be very time consuming. It might help to first build a
separate list or dictionary of only the cities with a population over
100,000. There are only 224 such cities in our list, but these cities have
over 6800 ZIP codes. On my desktop, computing the closest city out of all
possible cities for 10 separate cites took just under two seconds. For
1000 separate cities the calculation takes just over two minutes.
Computing the distance between every pair of cities in the data set would
take about an hour and a half. I don't recommend waiting that long for
this assignment.