Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Please do

Reply on news.ycombinator.com