What property makes hexagons superior to squares for grids?
Hexagons have six neighbors, all at identical distances from the center cell. This symmetry holds at every zoom level and every latitude, turning 'find nearby' from expensive continuous-distance calculations into O(1) table lookups of the six neighbor cell IDs.
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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