Germany by Chance
On the Making of computer-generated missions
Following the computer-generated Wappen-missions is a bit like playing „Germany by Chance“. Last week I toured Allensbach, Radolfzell and Ludwigshafen like this. And although I´ve been to all these towns the missions took me to places I haven´t been before. I noticed, that the missions usually start near the station of each town and wondered, how the program works that generates these routes. This is what I learned from Jörn:
The data the program is working with come from wikipedia. It´s all German towns or villages that are in wikipedia providing an emblem (Wappen) and a latitude/longitude - that is 4500 in total. These coordinates make the starting points. The problem is that sometimes these coordinates are located in a building or on private property. What they did to avoid this is a little trick using the reverse geocoding service Google is offering: it makes a postal adress out of a given coordinate. This postal adress then is retranslated into a coordinate. Since these coordinates are located on streets (not on buildings or private property) this translation work makes sure that the assigned starting points are accessible to everyone.
The next step the program is following is picking a spot in 500 meters beeline distance in a randomly chosen direction (this could be anything from 0° to 360°). Here again this could be in the middle of a lake, in a prison or on someone´s sofa so once again the little retranslation trick is applied. Now there is a starting and an ending to the mission. The last thing is to place some gold and a photo assignment on the way from one to the other. For this a route planner is used to define where to place it.
And that´s it. Pretty nice I think. I wonder what these 4500 destinations in Germany look like that are generated in this manner.
