Comments on: This has to be simple.

By: bowser

bowser — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:12:16 +0000

I think this is the one which allows for weighting the locations with more people. I’ll try it.

By: ER

ER — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 02:52:26 +0000

Take the average latitude of all the participants, and the average longitude, and then find a location near that lat/long
with decent accomodations, nearness to major highways or airports, or fun things to do.

Don’t be afraid to subjectively take into account things like potential bad weather, bad roads, etc to modify your decision.

You could probably do just as good a job by just looking at a road map and eyeballing it, your experience and intuition will automatically factor in stuff like “ugly mountain pass in winter”, or “this is just a short hop to Vegas!!!!”.

By: VelociraptorBlade

VelociraptorBlade — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:34:32 +0000

Why not just take a ruler to a map? I know it probably sounds stupid, but it’s the first solution that comes to mind. Get a Mercator or Dymaxion map, draw circles centered around each relative’s city, and see where they all intersect.

By: bowser

bowser — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:14:20 +0000

My thought on that would be to tell them that whatever point was the absolute center and however you want to get there is your decision. It’s such a simple problem in some ways, and someone should have done it, but I’ll be darned if I can even describe it, let alone find it.

By: TB

TB — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:13:35 +0000

Other factors include which of them might prefer to fly versus drive. A distant group that likes flying can be “edged” out further from the meeting place than one that can’t fly or prefers driving.

A program could be written for this sort of thing, but by the time you’d finished inputting all the variables, just eyeballing a map would probably still be easier.

By: bowser

bowser — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:59:20 +0000

That’s a pretty good idea. What I’m trying to do is plan a way for cousins to visit.

If there is one in New York and three in San Francisco it makes sense the one on the east coast fly to the west.

If there is one in New York, one in San Antonio, two in Seattle, two in Tucson, three in San Francisco it gets to be a more complex problem.

I suppose one could take a piece of stiff cardboard, paste a map on it, cut it out along the outside cities, stack the number of pennies there are people on the cities and then balance it.

That should do it, and once I had done that could re-use it. But I keep thinking there should be a program.

Thanks for your interest.

By: TB

TB — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 18:29:34 +0000

Airplane flights are not a trivial problem.

So many variables in price and availability. You can get a better deal sometimes routing way out of your way than a direct flight, and prices change all the time. Naturally, your meeting place would have to have a large airport.

Driving is a bit easier. I’d suggest the easiest way to deal with this is to put dots on a map, and basically look where the middle of the pattern is. Then the most important factor involves access to reasonable lodging.

By: bowser

bowser — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:57:37 +0000

Good question. Realistically it would be a mix, but let’s say driving.

I’d take either though.

By: TB

TB — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:20:32 +0000

Are we talking driving, or flying?