What is the trade-off of using hexagonal cells instead of continuous space?
A driver at cell A and a rider at cell B are treated as equidistant even if one pair is 10 meters apart and another is 1 km apart (both within the same cell). The cell resolution (typically 10–200 meters) is chosen to make this quantization error acceptable for the application.
Answered in
Why Uber Tiles the Planet in HexagonsHexagons with equidistant neighbors replace lat/long trigonometry with O(1) table lookups for finding nearby drivers and calculating surge pricing.
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