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Show HN: Algorithmically Finding the Longest Line of Sight on Earth

https://alltheviews.world
36•tombh•1h ago
We're Tom and Ryan and we teamed up to build an algorithm with Rust and SIMD to exhaustively search for the longest line of sight on the planet. We can confirm that a previously speculated view between Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan and the Hindu Kush in China is indeed the longest, at 530km.

We go into all the details at https://alltheviews.world

And there's an interactive map with over 1 billion longest lines, covering the whole world at https://map.alltheviews.world Just click on any point and it'll load its longest line of sight.

Some of you may remember Tom's post[1] from a few months ago about how to efficiently pack visibility tiles for computing the entire planet. Well now it's done. The compute run itself took 100s of AMD Turin cores, 100s of GBs of RAM, a few TBs of disk and 2 days of constant runtime on multiple machines.

If you are interested in the technical details, Ryan and I have written extensively about the algorithm and pipeline that got us here:

* Tom's blog post: https://tombh.co.uk/longest-line-of-sight

* Ryan's technical breakdown: https://ryan.berge.rs/posts/total-viewshed-algorithm

This was a labor of love and we hope it inspires you both technically and naturally, to get you out seeing some of these vast views for yourselves!

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45485227

Comments

umpriel•1h ago
Claps!
zoobab•39m ago
Cool places to try wifi long shots.

I did some longshots back in the early days of wifi.

ErroneousBosh•31m ago
You'd need to do a bit of work to adjust the timing, I suspect. At 530km the time delay would be around 1.75ms which would be enough to greatly upset WiFi ;-)

You could probably talk between ends using cheap crappy 446MHz 250mW walkie-talkies though.

galangalalgol•2m ago
This data base could be used to optimally place meshtastic nodes.
jstanley•38m ago
Neat. I did a related project a little while ago. I wasn't interested in how far I can see from everywhere, so much as what I can see from one place in particular.

So in mine you can click on a spot and it draws black lines over any land that is occluded by terrain, within 100km.

(But all with AI-generated JavaScript, not cool Rust and SIMD stuff)

https://incoherency.co.uk/line-of-sight-map/

eitally•29m ago
I am not sure if I'm experiencing what you describe. I just see a radiating circle of black lines, no matter where I click. I decided to click a local, notable "long line" viewpoint -- Lick Observatory outside San Jose. From here, on a clear day, you can see Half Dome in Yosemite, 120mi away. I still just see a black circle.
arethuza•7m ago
I think the lines indicate areas that you can't see?
jstanley•2m ago
How high off the ground are you standing when you see the Half Dome?

This is what I get when I set the observer height to 20m, and increase the "max distance" to 300km (200km = ~124 miles so may not be enough).

https://img.incoherency.co.uk/6478

It's also possible that the half dome is too short and the sampling rate of the line-of-sight jumps over it!

rob74•21m ago
Cool project! Unfortunately our planet has this pesky (but very useful!) thing called atmosphere, which makes all these extra-long lines of sight only theoretical, I guess? Ok, the longest line of sight is mostly over the Taklamakan desert, so probably very dry air (which might however have some dust/sand in it), but still?
tombh•15m ago
Thanks!

Well the record for the longest photographed line of sight is in the same region as our #3 longest line, at 483km https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/66661-lon... So not far off. And I think that even takes advantage of some favourable refraction. So not only might it be possible to see the longest view. But there may even be longer lines if we were to take into account extreme cases of refraction. Which is certainly something we'd love to try.

danielsamuels•12m ago
The website claims the longest line of sight in my city is 24.7km from someone's garden that is surrounded by houses. I walk past this particular spot on my way to the gym. I walk downhill from my house to get there. I seriously question the reliability of this data.
tombh•5m ago
The resolution of the underlying data is only ~100m. So most houses, vegetation, etc, gets blurred into the same smooth surface. There are actually higher resolution data sets, even up to centimetre scale, using LiDAR, of cities. We'd love to integrate these but it's a few orders of magnitude more data.

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