Street View cars need to find the fastest route through any city

May 7, 2013 08:30 GMT  ·  By

Google Street View is covering more and more cities all the time. There are now over 50 countries with Street View images, and Google is always looking to expand to new places and update existing locations.

To do that, it needs to spend as little time as possible in each location, get the shots through the fastest route.

As you can imagine, that's not actually very simple. City streets are rarely models of efficiency, anywhere in the world. Google uses powerful and complex algorithms to find the fastest routes through the places it shoots for Street View.

Recently, the Street View team encountered a special problem while shooting through Kaliningrad. In fact, it was a historical problem once tackled by the great mathematician Leonhard Euler.

Fittingly, it's dubbed Seven Bridges of Königsberg (the old name of Kaliningrad). The question was whether it is possible to cross through all of the bridges but only do it once for each.

Euler found that it wasn't possible, but his quest for a solution led to the development of graph theory and topology, used extensively in computer science and used by the Street View team to find the fastest routes. There's more about this in Google's blog post.

Almost 300 years after Euler, the Street View cars had to pass over some of the bridges more than once, but the good news is that the effort paid off and imagery from Kaliningrad is now online, including the seven famous bridges. 

"While the bridges of Königsberg may be one of Kaliningrad’s most famous landmarks, you can also explore other parts of this historic town with Street View—including the oldest building in the city, the Juditten Church, which was built before 1288, and King’s Gate, one of the city’s original six gates built during the 19th century," Google explained.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

One of the seven bridges of Kaliningrad
The Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem
Open gallery