Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)
- ID
- 19625
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 30 Aug 2026, 4:23 PM
- Fetched
- 01 Sep 2026, 5:53 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07389
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 01 Sep 2026, 5:58 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
A 2018 arXiv paper by Rohan Chabukswar and Kushal Mukherjee computes the longest straight-line path you can sail without hitting land and the longest you can drive without hitting a major body of water. The authors frame it as a chaotic optimization problem complicated by islands, lakes, and the fractal nature of coastlines, and solve it using a branch-and-bound algorithm.
Why it matters
This is a recreational computational geometry problem with no direct build-or-ship impact. The only practical takeaway is seeing branch-and-bound applied to a messy real-world optimization over geospatial data, which could inspire similar approaches if you work on route-finding or geospatial constraint problems.
Discussion angle
How branch-and-bound handles a search space made chaotic by fractal coastlines, and whether modern geospatial tooling (e.g., PostGIS, H3) would make this problem trivial or still hard today.