Thanks Luca
I did not think the solution is significant or novel. It was a question
on the forum, and I thought I had a reasonable answer.
I had been used it for a while thinking it is a "natural extension of
binary search". But yes - this seems to have a name, and also seems to
have patents (as per the wiki page you cite).
Thank you
On 12/12/2013 11:31 PM, Luca Morandini wrote:
I just mentioned my approach since it is a common misconception that
multidimensional can not be efficiently mapped to single dimension. I
found the
solution to work very well, and it is conceptually simple also.
Back in the day, Oracle came up with Helical Hyperspatial Codes, which
were supposed to be used for multi-dimensional data (including
geo-spatial ones); more modestly what you devised is called GeoHash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
