426: Geohashing

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Saturday is game night
Title text: Saturday is game night


Geocaching is a sport where you have to find things hidden by other people based on geographical coordinates. Randall has had a similar idea before in 201: Christmas GPS.

Geohashing is a sport created by Randall based on reaching a random location determined by an algorithm that uses a hash function that involves the current date, location and the Dow opening price. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a stock market index dealt in New York City.

The algorithm is built in a way that:

  • Makes it impossible to plan a meeting in advance - because of the Dow.
  • Changes every day.
  • Gathers people that are nearby - everyone within the same 1°×1° grid square gets the same position.

The algorithm works as follows:

  1. Take the current date in the format yyyy-mm-dd- and append the most recent opening value for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
  2. Pass this string through the MD5 algorithm.
  3. Divide the hash value into two 16 character halves, and convert each half to a decimal.
  4. Take the integer portions of your current coordinates and append the decimal hash values.

MD5 is a cryptographic hashing algorithm, and converts plaintext data into a seemingly random 128-bit (32 character) string. A good hashing algorithm should have three main properties: it is non-reversible and you cannot generate any plaintext data back from the hash, a given sample of data will always produce the same hash value, but even a tiny change to the original plaintext should produce an entirely different hash.

The example co-ordinates are for the Google headquarters in California, as you can see here: 37.421542 -122.085589.

While geohashing was originally intended as a joke, there are people who geohash regularly. Please see the link to the xkcd wiki above.


Date (example): 2005-05-26
That date's (or most recent) DOW opening: 10458.68
[Concatenate, with a hyphen: 2005-05-26-10458.68]
md5: db9318c2259923d08b672cb305440f97
[Split it up into two pieces:]
0.db9318c2259923d0, 0.8b672cb305440f97
To decimal: 0.857713..., 0.544544...
Your location (example): 37.421542, -122.085589
[Combine integer part of location with fractional part of hash:]
Destination Coordinates: 37.857713, -122.544544
Sample Implementation: http://xkcd.com/geohashing/


  • In response to comic 353: Python, the Python developers implemented the module antigravity in version 2.7+. This module contains a reference geohashing function.



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