There’s nothing like taking the scenic route while vacationing in a new city, but the always-efficient GPS programs we navigate with simply plot the shortest route to reach a destination. But now there’s hope for the aesthetically oriented wayfarer: Researchers have designed an algorithm that charts the most beautiful route from point A to B. Yahoo! researchers used crowd-sourced data to build a program that automatically identifies the most alluring pathways through a city. What's more, the application plotted a course that was on average just 7 minutes longer than the shortest route — a small sacrifice for a more pleasurable journey.
Beauty is a truly relative term, so researchers turned to the masses in order to locate attractive nodes within London— the first city they tested their algorithm in. They used a website called UrbanGems.org
, which asks each visitor to choose the more beautiful of two photographs, collected ...
