Dear R helpers, I think that this may be a bit of a math question as the more I consider it, the harder it seems. I am trying to come up with a way to work out the minimum distance between line segments. For instance, consider 20 random line segments:
x1 <- runif(20) y1 <- runif(20) x2 <- runif(20) y2 <- runif(20) plot(x1, y1, type = "n") segments(x1, y1, x2, y2) Inititally I thought the solution to this problem was to work out the distance between midpoints (it quickly became apparent that this is totally wrong when looking at the plot). So, I thought that perhaps finding the minimum distance between each of the lines endpoints AND their midpoints would be a good proxy for this, so I set up a loop that uses pythagoras to work out these 9 distances and find the minimum. But, this solution is obviously flawed as well (sometimes lines actually intersect, sometimes the minimum distances are less etc). Any help/dection on this one would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance, Darcy. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
