How do find the point furthest from a group of points.

October 6, 2009 3:50 AM

How to find the point furthest from a bunch of other points, as done with this this McDonald's map?

Stephen Von Worley got the location of all the McDonald's in the US from AggData and then was able to find the place in the US furthest from any of those points.

What technique would he have used to find this spot? In the blog post, Van Worley credits 'software engineering gymnastics', and I don't know what to search for to find out more.

Thanks!

posted by StephenF to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: Its the vertex of a Voronoi diagram.
posted by vacapinta at 3:57 AM on October 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Its the vertex of a Voronoi diagram.

And to find out which vertex it actually is, you'd need to find the vertex whose nearest McDonald's is furthest away. But that's the simple part.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 4:17 AM on October 6, 2009

Voronoi diagrams also appeared on the blue recently.
posted by Johnny Assay at 5:06 AM on October 6, 2009

It's easy to doing using ArGIS - which is the dominant software for geographical analysis. There are built in functions for calculating distances from points. There are a few open-source alternatives (GRASS, Geoda, R for Spatial Statistics) but they are quite hard to use.
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 6:26 AM on October 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

oops, that should have been ArcGIS
posted by a womble is an active kind of sloth at 6:28 AM on October 6, 2009

Response by poster: Many thanks everyone.
posted by StephenF at 6:47 AM on October 6, 2009