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Use haversine formula for great-circle distance - #90

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AndGem merged 1 commit into
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fix/haversine-distance
May 20, 2026
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AndGem merged 1 commit into
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fix/haversine-distance

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@AndGem

@AndGem AndGem commented May 20, 2026

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The spherical law of cosines loses numerical precision for short distances, since acos operates near 1.0 (the min(1, cos_val) clamp was a symptom of this). Adjacent OSM nodes are typically metres apart, so this is the dominant case for the tool.

Switch to the haversine formula, which is numerically stable for short distances. The Earth radius constant (6373000 m) is unchanged so edge lengths stay comparable to previous output.

The spherical law of cosines loses numerical precision for short
distances, since acos operates near 1.0 (the min(1, cos_val) clamp was
a symptom of this). Adjacent OSM nodes are typically metres apart, so
this is the dominant case for the tool.

Switch to the haversine formula, which is numerically stable for short
distances. The Earth radius constant (6373000 m) is unchanged so edge
lengths stay comparable to previous output.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@AndGem
AndGem merged commit 05b8a5a into main May 20, 2026
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AndGem deleted the fix/haversine-distance branch May 20, 2026 17:55
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