426: Geohashing

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Geohashing

Title text: Saturday is game night

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Geocaching is a sport where you have to find things hidden by other people based on geographical coordinates. Randall has had a similar idea before in 201: Christmas GPS.

Geohashing is a sport created by Randall based on reaching a random location determined by an algorithm that involves the current date, location and Dow opening price.

The algorithm is built in a way that:

• Makes it impossible to plan a meeting in advance - because of the Dow.
• Changes every day.
• Gathers people that are nearby - everyone within the same 1°×1° grid square gets the same position.

Originally intended as a joke, there are people which do geohashing regularly. Please see the link to the xkcd wiki above.

Transcript

Date (example): 2005-05-26

That date's (or most recent) DOW opening: 10458.68

[Concatenate, with a hyphen: 2005-05-26-10458.68]

md5: db9318c2259923d08b672cb305440f97

[Split it up into two pieces:]

0.db9318c2259923d0, 0.8b672cb305440f97

To decimal: 0.857713..., 0.544544...

Your location (example): 37.421542, -122.085589

[Combine integer part of location with fractional part of hash:]

Destination Coordinates: 37.857713, -122.544544

Sample Implementation: http://xkcd.com/geohashing/

Trivia

• In response to comic 353: Python, the Python developers implemented the module antigravity in version 2.7+. This module contains a reference geohashing function.

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Discussion

Isn't there an app for this? Or am I just confused? Unpopular Opinions (talk) 18:13, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

There are lots of them for different platforms, in fact. 162.158.203.21 10:02, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

The official implementation (http://xkcd.org/geohashing that redirects to http://carabiner.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html) doesn't seem to be working anymore.

There are other implementations, such as https://geohashing.info/ --XXOs (talk) 01:06, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Should there be a thing about the 30W rule? --XXOs (talk) 01:06, 8 September 2021 (UTC)