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DataPacRat comments on Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Know about geospatial analysis?
I'm building a story involving Jupiter's moon, Io. There's a geological map of it on the bottom half of this image. What I'd like to figure out is which sites have the widest variety of terrain types within the shortest distances? Or, put another way, which sites would be most worth dropping an automated factory down on, as they'd require the minimal amount of road-building to get to a useful variety of resources? Or, put a third way, what's the fewest number of sites that would be required to have a complete set of the terrain-types within, say, a hundred kilometres of each site?
I can sort of see how a computer program might run some colour-detection on that image to figure out a map, and then run some algorithms about the value of each pixel - but that's a notch or two above my programming skill, and I don't think I have the time to both improve my programming skill and keep working on the story.
Any suggestions?
Thank you for your time.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67168735/io%20geo.pdf gives a more detailed and thorough map.
You don't need to do any figuring out -- you already have an image. The image is a bitmap, just directly read the value of each pixel.
Your three questions are asking for different things and (1) and (2) are underspecified -- you will be trading off "variety" against closeness and you have to get precise about that.
For a not too large a map, it's probably easiest to just brute-force it. You can be sophisticated about it, but CPU time is much much cheaper than human time.
I'm still trying to figure out which questions would provide the most useful answers for my purposes. If you don't mind my asking, what questions do you think are the ones I should be trying to get answers to?
I don't know your purpose. What are you trying to achieve?
A reasonable realistic set of worldbuilding and background details and constraints, within which to build a story according to the principles of "hard SF". While I could get away with simply not getting into specific details about what locations on Io are industrialized, the more details I have to work with, the more I interesting plot points I can build based on those details. Put another way, I find it less important to know what a technology or character can do than to know what they can't do.
In the story, a seed-factory was dropped on Io from another of Jupiter's moons, because Io's geology allows for easy access to a number of different minerals, which allow for the development of a number of industrial processes that would have been economically infeasible on the other moon, thus allowing for more rapid production of certain useful tools and products, such as computer chips. In my current story draft, at a certain point, there will be an 'Io Site 1' which has spread into 'Io Site 1b', 'Io Site 1c', and the like; and an 'Io Site 2' elsewhere to take advantage of a different collection of resources. Building entirely new sites is more expensive than expanding pre-existing ones, and maintaining long roads is moderately expensive, so it would be useful for my story-building to know how few sites would be necessary to make all of Io's various kinds of resources available, and/or where some good sites with an unusual variety of resources are located.
A resource I'm not entirely sure is sufficiently relevant suggests that Gish Bar Mons, https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Gish_Bar_Patera¶ms=16.18_N_90.26_W_globe:io_type:landmark_source:gpn , might be a site for Io Site 1, and Loki Patera, https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Loki_Patera¶ms=13_N_308.8_W_globe:io_type:mountain , for Io SIte 2; but Io's got over 40 million square kilometres to consider, and I'm more than willing to use other sites, if I can figure any out.
So it's basically economics?
Then you need to assign values to resources, costs to factories and roads, and optimize for profit :-)