Thursday, December 04, 2014

Geometric Median

During a meeting with some coworkers we started debating if it was possible to find a better meeting location. Given the starting location of all the meeting participants, could we find a point which minimizes the total travel distance?

It turns out that it is not trivial to solve. The average of the participant locations is not necessarily the optimal point. The actual optimal point is called the geometric median.

I made a HTML5 page which visualizes the geometric median, along with the convex cost function: http://www.byronknoll.com/median.html