4 ms·
Do you think the curvature is why it's wrong or there's just a mistake/bug that the code skipped that point/pair? Distance is ~5% off but the latitude differenc
by bunabhucan 4y ago
Do you think the curvature is why it's wrong or there's just a mistake/bug that the code skipped that point/pair? Distance is ~5% off but the latitude difference between the two SE candidates are only ~1/70th of a quarter circle.
- hakuseki 4y agoA small latitude difference does not imply that you can ignore curvature. I am just guessing, but perhaps your intuition is that the shortest path should lie along a line of latitude. An easy-to-see counterexample would be two points close to the north pole, but with 180 degrees of longitude separating them. In this case the shortest path actually goes through the north pole, rather than around it. You can also generalize this say that within the northern hemisphere, the shortest path between two points will curve (when viewed on a flat map) towards the north pole.
- sobriquet9 4y agocos(54 deg)/cos(49 deg) ~ 0.588/0.656 ~ 0.9, so a longitude degree in the north of the country is about 10% shorter than in the south.