HollyKing's Journal

Today was my second attempt at a Noonhat lunch. Things didn't go as well as last time. When you register at Noonhat you specify a center and a radius that covers where you can go for lunch. For example, here's an image of my match for today:

Noonhat Map As you can see the only overlap for all three of us is in the middle of Lake Washington. I place the blame on the person who decided to place their circle in the middle of the lake.

I don't know the details of the matching algorithm used by Noonhat. Maybe they should include a minimum amount of overlap because two of us only barely had any area in common. Removing one of us would have left the other two with a larger potential lunch area.

Another option is to subtract lakes and rivers from consideration during a match. I think the coastline data is available from the USGS but it would be quite the project to generate the irregular polygons and find matches. Since Noonhat is just getting started I doubt they have the resources to tackle that problem. It would be an interesting challenge though.

I've registered for another lunch. Here's hoping the magic strikes again.