If you grew up in the United States, chances are you’ve dreamt about a cross-country road trip. However, unless you’ve had the fortune of actually following through, the ultimate American road trip has remained a romantic notion in your mind. People fantasize about their specific route, the type of car they’d take, who they’d go with, where they’d stop and for how long. Because the United States is so large – both geographically and culturally – monuments like Mount Rushmore remained just as far and allusive as David in Florence, Italy, or the Red Square in Moscow. However, now that dream may be a step closer to reality as Michigan data scientist, Randy Olsen, released what people are calling the “ultimate road trip.”
Discovery News approached Olsen to come up with the best road trip with the shortest distance. They devised three rules for him. Firstly, the route would have to stop in all 48 of the contiguous states. Rule one is due to the condition of rule two – that the road trip can only be taken in a car (sorry, Hawaii) and cannot leave U.S. territory (sorry, Alaska). Lastly, rule three is that there have to be stops at National Natural Landmarks, National Historic Sites, or National Monuments.
Although Olsen has a mathematical background, he sought out to comply with these rules and make the ultimate American road trip appealing to everyone. He began by compiling a list of 50 major landmarks, including Washington D.C., and two in California. Next, came the math. Olsen had to derive a way to compute the closest distance between the landmarks. He went to Google Maps.
Google Maps, most people would agree, is easy to use and easy to understand. But when you’re browsing through over 2,500 different directions, it can take a while. There is a Google Maps API – which is a service that provides travel distance and time for a matrix of destinations. Thus, Olsen created a Python script to calculate the distance and time between the routes.
However, the task did not end there – Olsen still needed to ensure that the distance between the landmarks was the shortest it could be in the context of the entire road trip. Thus, backtracks, reroutes, and returns to different states all posed different difficulties.
To remedy the situation, Olsen created a genetic algorithm to provide a solution that is going viral on the web today. It’s a route that requires only 13,699 miles of driving, which, without traffic, could take 224 hours, or a little over nine days without stopping. Also, it’s “circular” so that no matter where you start you can follow the route in either direction.
The list of all the sites and landmarks can be found on his blog here, as well as an additional road trip option that focuses on cityscapes as opposed to nature-oriented attractions.
