Google Maps recently added a feature where you can click and drag on a route to add a waypoint. This is a nice feature because it lets you find an alternative path if the path Google suggests is bad, or if you'd like to travel through a certain place on a road trip.

I used this feature tonight to come up with a route that takes you through all 48 of the contiguous U.S. states. My initial route was about 9,300 miles long, but after substantial tweaking, I got the distance down to just 7,469 miles. I think my current path is pretty good -- can you find one that's shorter? (The computer scientists in the crowd will recognize this as a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem.)

(Click the image for a zoomed version that you can play with.)

I figure this solution is pretty good because the starting points let you ignore most of California and Oregon, which is a significant distance, and there's very little doubling back -- once to hit Wyoming, once for Minnesota, once for Nebraska, once for Wisconsin, and once for Michigan. I'm sure someone out there can do better, though.

Some possible variants you could also try out:

• The shortest cycle that goes through the 48 states (returning to the starting point)
• The shortest route that includes Alaska as well (Google Maps seems to not want us to travel to Hawaii :))
• The shortest path that visits all the countries of Europe
• The path that goes through all 48 states while using the lowest number of waypoints

Feel free to post links to your own maps below. :)

Bookmark/search this post with:

delicious | digg | reddit