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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Location without DR
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2018 Feb 21, 08:12 -0800
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2018 Feb 21, 08:12 -0800
Marco, just to emphasize, it is relatively easy to modify your algorithm to generate points in such a manner that they are evenly-distibuted over the globe --evenly-distributed in the sense that the probability per square mile is the same at all latitudes and longitudes. There are a number of ways to do this. I'll repeat my standard approach here since it's short and simple:
Generate a pair of random numbers (x,y) in the range from -90 to +90. If x>90·cos(y), reject the point.
Then y is interpreted as latitude and x is converted to longitude:
Lat = y,
Lon = 2·x/cos(y).
That's all there is to it (assuming I set it up correctly!). Now you have random points with no preference for one geographic region over another.
Frank Reed