Inspiration
During a discussion on the culinary offerings of Ottawa, I inevitably began thinking of shawarma and of its ubiquity throughout the city. Having lived here for 23 years, I felt like the classic middle-eastern food was almost always within walking distance. This was only a hunch however and I had no evidence to back it up, but I wanted to find out.
What it does
This program computes the average distance to the nearest shawarma restaurant within the city of Ottawa in kilometers, a number I've affectionately named Ottawa's Number. In addition to this, it finds the shawarma equivalent to Nemo's Point (that is, what is the furthest point from a shawarma restaurant) as well as the shawarma restaurant you are most likely to be close to on average.
How we built it
I built this using a Python Jupyter notebook to crunch the numbers. To help find the shawarma restaurants, Google' Place API was used.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge of this hack was determining an algorithm for computing both the closest restaurant to a given point as well as find the distance to that restaurant (converting from long lat measurements to kilometers)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I managed to do this without paying a cent to Google
What we learned
I learned how to translate latitude and longitude distances to surface distances using the haversine formula.
What's next for Ottawa's Number
Nothing... this was a hack that had a question, now that the question is answered I don't see any future for it.
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