Find the longest sea in a straight line

Looking at the images above, we can see that these roads don't seem straight. But remember the Earth is spherical and when it spreads out to the plane, the arcs will become straight lines.

Blue is the longest "winning" sea route.Red is the straightest path on the longest set - (Photo: Science).

Rohan Chabukswar from the US Center for Technology Research and Kushal Mukherjee from IBM Research India have found the longest straight sea route in the world with a length of 32,089.7km.

The road begins from the coast of Sonmiani, Pakistan, across the strait between Madagascar and the African continent, continuing to cross the strait between the South American continent and the Antarctic continent, eventually heading north to the north-west across Thailand. Binh Duong to the end is Karaginsky district, Kamchatka region, Russia.

32,089.7 km long road - (Photo: Science).

Interestingly, the waterway that closely resembles this road is found by an amateur.

At the end of 2012, a Reddit user named Patrick Anderson , an environmental lawyer in Decatur, Georgia (USA), said the 32.090.3km voyage from southern Pakistan to northeastern Russia was a straight path. the longest sea on Earth.

Anderson fumbled on the map and estimated the results. After that, he used the computer to show that this was a straight path and calculated its length.

Video by Patrick Anderson proves statements on his map - (Source: YouTube).

When I saw videos of Anderson on the internet, Rohan Chabukswar and Kushal Mukherjee were extremely interested in the topic and decided to find the answer.

First, two scientists collected data on Earth terrain from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Delegation. They use computer-based algorithms to draw straight lines (on the globe are arcs) 1.8km apart from the field.

Chabukswar and Mukherjee gathered 233,280,000 straight lines, each containing about 21,600 points 1.8km apart on land or sea. It is estimated that about 5,038,848,000,000 points need to be calculated.

Then, they use branching and limit algorithms to work by considering all possible possibilities to determine the longest straight line in the sea.

The algorithm then checks the feasibility of each branch on the diagram, looks at the combinations in one branch and tries to find results that are closest to the optimal value.

After about 10 minutes of computing, 2 scientists found the answer.

The longest straight line in the world runs through 15 countries - (Photo: Science).

Also in this study, Chabukswar and Mukherjee used the same technique to find the longest path on the Earth.

The computers take 45 minutes to calculate the 11,241km long road running through 15 different countries, head from Guangzhou, eastern China to Sagres in western Portugal.