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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Great question! Is it the center of a convex hull containing the extent of territories? Or would you weight it by population? Is it in two dimensions on the surface of the Earth, or in three dimensions?

Consider the possible “center” of France. There’s probably some village in France proper with a monument, but unless you eject Guiana and Réunion I think it must be in the Atlantic somewhere.

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Territories (eg French Guiana) are specifically separated in Worldle, even being possible answers themselves.

Also, this is a map game, so for me it's pretty intuitive that it is the center of the hull. Maybe with some error due to projection (not sure how they implemented the map), but should not be a problem for solving the puzzle.

> Also, this is a map game, so for me it's pretty intuitive that it is the center of the hull.

I don't follow. How does this being a map game make it intuitive that the distance outputs are based on hull centers? To me, closest border would seem be the most intuitive reading of the distance...this being a map game.

If you poll 10 random people, I guarantee 10/10 would say that they consider borders to be the intuitive means of measurement of distance between two countries, not their (hull) centers.

Please do

For the arrow hint to work at all, countries need to be a single point. I intuitively assumed the hull centre without really thinking about it.

> For the arrow hint to work at all, countries need to be a single point.

First of all; no, not at all. The arrow hint can work if countries are considered a mass, not a point, it simply means that there can be times when there are any number of correct arrow designations.

Second of all, even if countries are considered as single points for the arrow hint, that is not the issue being presently discussed: that of the distance hint, which is a separate hint from the arrow hint. Countries can be considered as single points for the arrow hint, and as masses for the distance hint.

I don’t know what you mean by “considered a mass” unless you mean “centre of mass”, which is a point. If there are times where there are a lot of correct arrow designations, how is that not more confusing?

In my opinion, using a different measure for the distance and direction would have been even more confusing. It’s also a lot harder to program for a silly web game.

My reading of it is that it's easiest to program if they just ask google maps the latlon of the country and use that. It's a lot more work to base it off the closest border.

Here’s my n=1, I guessed it was “center” as opposed to borders, but I feel like this might be influenced by what country you play the game with first.

Interesting, since my understanding of the matter is that the status of Guiana within France is as integral with that nation as Alaska is with the U.S.

Yes it is indeed an integral part of France — a full department as mentioned in a sibling comment.

(This is all news to me. I somehow assumed that French Guiana and British Virgin Islands were independent countries.)

I think French Guiana is not a territory, it's a full department in France. Equal to Hawaii in the US as far as I know, but I'm not 100% sure.

That’s my understanding too. Something about Napoleon wanting to be egalitarian. Has the interesting side-effect that France is both the western-most and eastern-most country in the EU.

About egalitarian Napoleon:

> In 1801, Louverture issued a constitution for Saint-Domingue [now Haiti] that decreed he would be governor-for-life and called for black autonomy and a sovereign black state. In response, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched a large expeditionary force of French soldiers and warships to the island, led by Bonaparte's brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, to restore French rule. They were under secret instructions to restore slavery, at least in the formerly Spanish-held part of the island.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution#Napoleon_in...

As for French Guiana, it was actually an extreme penal colony at that time (also, it was briefly held by Portugal). It became a department in 1946.

The centroid, surely.

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