Paul and I did a little early-morning geocaching before our W3C WS-Addressing/WSDL Joint Meeting in Yokohama.

After a bit of bushwalking in the landscaping at Rinco park on the shore of Yokohama, and dodging these huge yellow-and-blue-striped spiders, Paul spotted the cache. Not having any trinkets on hand worthy of marking the occasion, we converted a couple of plastic sushi trinkets into Travel Bugs. A Travel Bug is a small object marked by a numbered dog tag allowing its movements to be tracked on the web. Our two Travel Bugs, Great Sushi race: ebi and Great Sushi Race: futo-maki will move from cache to cache, gradually (we hope) finding their way home to our respective backyard caches. The first one home wins a sushi dinner compliments of the loser.

So, which is farther in geocaching terms? California or Berkhamsted? Often measured mileage isn’t the most reliable measure of speed. A large hop isn’t that uncommon. It seems that the crucial factor for speed may be the strength of connections between "nodes" in the web of geocaches. It may be difficult (based on the behavior of geocachers) to move from one network of nodes to another network. Weak network connections may happen anywhere, not just at the most obvious geographic boundaries (like oceans). In fact airport-to-airport connections appear to be pretty strong. For "ebi," the network edge I’m worried about is the boundary between simple accessible (drive-up) caches and ebi’s destination cache which involves a several mile hike.

Or it may be that network weakness is pretty even across the board, with cachers statistically likely to visit arbitrary caches. In that case just the latency between hops may be the limiting factor. 6 hops usually takes longer then 3 hops, irrespective of the distance of those hops. lf so, the most attractive Travel Bug might have an advantage, as more cachers will want to take it to a new home.  Or they might feel sorry for an unattractive one (I maintain that’s what has happened so far!)

In the end, I’m sure the compounded sequence of arbitrary decisions that propel a Travel Bug forward lead to an outcome that is pretty random.