Now that GPS has been around for a little while and the devices and chips come down in price, various games have sprung up around the technology. More well-known are things like GeoCashing (a GPS-based treasure hunt) and many more... I came across a concept called Geohashing today while trawling the internet. The original idea of geohash.org was to provide, given a location, a short URL which uniquely specified that location. It seems that the algorithm was inteded for use in forums etc.
Geohashing spawned an xkcd comic which gives an algorithm for generating a random location near you each day in terms of latitude and longitude. Here's the algorithm, as seen on xkcd:
Having read this, apparently, people started to travel to the location given by the algorithm, quickly realising that there were other xkcd readers there too.
Check out the wiki for more details. Or alternatively go here to have Google maps show you where the geohashing algorithm will take you today!
No comments:
Post a Comment