According to Science Magazine top news, traveling from the region Southern Pakistan to Northeastern Russia has been regarded to be the longest boat ride in the whole world without any rudder.
A few years back, in about 2013, a user on Reddit had put forward that the entire trip would yield of 32,090 kilometers. After all these years, the scientists have finally confirmed it after their calculations and taking in all the possible points to consider and measure. A bunch of computer scientists has successfully developed an algorithm that authenticates the route. The algorithm made by them also demonstrates the longest straight line that can be taken on land.
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The researchers include Rohan Chabukswar from The United Technologies Research Center in Ireland and Kushal Mukherjee from IBM Research India. They created this algorithm in response to the map posted and suggested by the Reddit user by the name of kepleronly knows back in 2013. The Reddit user, whose real name is Patrick Anderson, posted a map that showed an enormous, 20,000-mile route extending from Pakistan through the southern bits of Africa and South America and then finally ending in an epic trans-Pacific journey to Siberia. However on the traditional 2D map, the path looks nothing like a straight line, but this should also be noted that earth is sphere so the line is straight but appears opposite to us.
“There would be 233,280,000 great circles to consider to find the global optimum, and each great circle would have 21,600 individual points to process—a staggering 5,038,848,000,000 points to verify,”
That is about five trillion, 38 billion and 848 million points. Which is massive!
Both the researches were deprived of the right equipment to compute such a massive operation and they ended up with an optimization scheme called as “branch-and-bound.” And the current news has it that with this scheme, they calculated the sea route and quite, fortunately, their algorithm matched the map.
