Challenge #100: Find Ned!

[LordNeilLord]

@estherb47 0.3 meters! That's got to be some sort of witch craft

[estherb47]

@LordNeilLord, witchcraft or a lot of time testing a lot of different ideas, and iterations of those. Alteryx got a workout with this challenge!! I even went down to smaller grids, but they found points that were further away from Ned :)

[NicoleJohnson]

Hoorah for Challenge 100! And to finding @Ned (0.3m away in 21.5 seconds)!! Looks like a great spot. Maybe we should host Inspire 2019 out there in the wild Colorado yonder... :)

Spoiler

Ended up with basically the same solution as several others... I spent a LOT of time playing around with buffers, spatial process, and varying orders of tools, but this definitely seemed to be the fastest/closest method.
 

Super fun challenge #100 @ChristineB!! It's been lovely reaching these last 100 milestones with you, @JoeM, and the rest of the Community. The view is quite lovely up here!

Cheers,

NJ

[Natasha]

I finally got my head around this challenge which was quite challenging. Final results are 3.6m from Ned in 22.2 seconds

Spoiler

At first I went completely the wrong way of thinking about this. Since I was not sure what I need to look for, I imagined this to be some sort of iterative process of checking the answers and I was looking for a way to automatically call an app from run command tool and populate it with app value files. Obviously I failed. 

After chatting to @PhilipMannering I realised that I missed a very crucial information while skimming through the task, and that is Ned set up his tent in the farthest location from any road in the state of Colorado. Well now all the grid solutions started to make sense to me. I spent some time to figure out what is the correct relationship between the target and universe, and went on to decrease the size of the grid. At the end I think my solution is quite similar to @estherb47.

[JosephSerpis]

Challenge Completed took over a minute

[iain_sterland]

0.9 metres in 29.4 seconds

[jamielaird]

71.8 meters in 20.2 seconds

Spoiler

[SeanAdams]

So - took a week and a half to go through this - tried some pretty silly ideas on the way.

Solution details in the spoiler section - around 2m30sec (if you exclude the weeks it took me to get a solution that ran in a sensible time)

Spoiler

The solution that I got to just uses progressively larger buffers (around the roads) in an interative macro to find the value of a buffer that eliminates all but the final spot where Ned is hiding.

This is the main flow - it first puts the roads into a buffered polygon, and then looks for ever larger buffersput buffer around the roads. Broken into batches of 50 to speed this alongThen look iteratively for the largest buffer that still returns one hiding place
The solution posed by @LordNeilLord ; @JosephSerpis ; @Natasha @ggruccio @estherb47 @DataPrepChad; @jamielaird @NicoleJohnson; @patrick_digan using a grid then a spatial match and/or filter for nearest is much more effective.

[kat]

This must have been the hardest challenge I've ever done. Took quite a while to figure out and the final product just seems so inelegant. Nonetheless, just under 20 seconds to run and 33m away. 

Spoiler