This Amazing Roadmap Shows the Perfect Route to Hit Every Major US Landmark
by N/A, 9 years ago |
2 min read
One man decided to apply an algorithm to national travel and ended up optimizing the absolutely PERFECT cross-country road trip.Â
The man was Randy Olsen, and he was joined by Tracy Staedter from Discovery News while plotting this wonderful map.Â
A big part of the challenge was they only wanted their map to include national monuments and parks, and they wanted it to have stops in all 48 contiguous US states. Needless to say this trip was only meant to take place by car.
Next, they had to find a way so that the routes between each followed an order so that they could take the shortest routes possible while doing as little back-tracking as they could.
This is ultimately working to avoid running into the "traveling salesman" problem.Â
When they found the algorithm, they produced this fabulous map!
They were also able to produce a similar map stopping in popular cities instead of at national parks/monuments.
They made a list of landmarks they wanted to hit, and then calculated the "true" distance between each of these landmarks. With 50 landmarks, they ended up calculating 2,500 routes.
This means the distance it actually is when driven by car, not the distance according to the straightest line between the two landmarks. Luckily they were able to find this by using the Google Maps API.Â
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