I actually used this idea once. I had three known points which were approximately equidistant from an unknown center. I wanted to find the center. So I used a

I actually used this idea once. I had three known points which were approximately equidistant from an unknown center. I wanted to find the center. So I used a hillclimbing algorithm to search for the center by guessing points and seeing how close they were. The fitness function was the difference between the proposed center and the three points. The idea being to minimize the distance between their. If the lines were exactly the same length, I would have found the center. It didn't work at all though. It gave wildly incorrect answers, and sometimes even converged on infinity... Even when running it many many times to avoid local optima.