Squid And Other Games
A Geography Cheating Lesson
We looked at Google Maps and raise the question of whether it is truly trustful, and how close to reality it actually is. If you set a destination then will the route it gives you actually be the best and get you to the right place.
Roads and routes have been surveyed by cameras and machines and compiled into maps that have, so far, been trustworthy by those who travel the routes. Cartographers before computers would do the exact same when creating maps and would still be trusted despite the margin for error being much higher.
Google Maps works by assigning each road a value. This value would be decided by a number of factors, including distance, difficulty, speed, and more. There a various ways to calculate the best route, the easiest to code but worst in practice would be to calculate the values of every possible route and pick the smallest valued route. Google Maps doesn’t use this specific method of calculation but when it does assign you a route, it has calculated the values of several routes and found the smallest value route to give you.