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May 3, 2018 03:30 am
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/GeIIkP0304s/the-longest-straight-path-you-could-travel-on-water-without-hitting-land
The Longest Straight Path You Could Travel On Water Without Hitting Land
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Back in 2012, a Reddit user posted a map claiming to show the longest straight line that could be traversed across the ocean without hitting land. Intrigued, a pair of computer scientists have developed an algorithm that corroborates the route, while also demonstrating the longest straight line that can be taken on land. The researchers, Rohan Chabukswar from United Technologies Research Center Ireland, and Kushal Mukherjee from IBM Research India, created the algorithm in response to a map posted by reddit user user kepleronlyknows, who goes by Patrick Anderson in real life. His map showed a long, 20,000 mile route extending from Pakistan through the southern tips of Africa and South America and finally ending in an epic trans-Pacific journey to Siberia. On a traditional 2D map, the path looks nothing like a straight line; but remember, the Earth is a sphere. Anderson didn't provide any evidence for the map, or an explanation for how the route was calculated. In light of this, Chabukswar and Mukherjee embarked upon a project to figure out if the straight line route was indeed the longest, and to see if it was possible for a computer algorithm to solve the problem, both for straight line passages on water without hitting land or an ice sheet, and for a continuous straight line passage on land without hitting a major body of water. Their ensuing analysis was posted to the pre-print arXiv server earlier this month, and has yet to go through peer review. "There would be 233,280,000 great circles to consider to find the global optimum, and each great circle would have 21,600 individual points to process -- a staggering 5,038,848,000,000 points to verify," the researchers wrote in their study.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/GeIIkP0304s/the-longest-straight-path-you-could-travel-on-water-without-hitting-land
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