I am playing with IP's (unique identifier of a computer network) and I can send a message from my IP to another IP and calculate how long does it take to get an answer back from it (what is called "ping") - sort of what you would do with a radar/sonar.
Now, I can "ping" the same IP from different IP's spread around the world and get the results (in miliseconds) and use it as a proxy for distance.However, I cannot rely entirely on the ping to calculate the distance, as there are other factors that affect the measure, so using the ping as a ratio for the distances wouldn't be very accurate.
Still, I believe with enough data points (I have around 80) and the ranking/order of these points, I could get a very good idea of where this point lies on.
Inb4: I am aware that there are other better methods to discover an IP's location. I am just curious about how one would do it using just this information.
Example: The table below shows the ranking of the distances between a given unknown geolocation point and other known locations around the Globe (the ping is the average of many attempts):
Ranking | City | Ping (ms);
1 | United States - S. Antonio | 51.068;
2 | United States - Seattle | 71.961;
3 | Denmark - Copenhagen | 86.893;
4 | Italy - Milan | 91.440;
5 | Portugal - Lisbon | 100.414;
6 | Poland - Warsaw | 100.522;
7 | Lithuania - Vilnius | 104.825;
8 | Russian Federation - Moscow | 116.660;
9 | Israel - Kiryat-Matalon | 136.277;
10 | Hungary - Budapest | 136.810;
Can I find the location of this IP? (the IP used is of one of Google's servers: 72.14.255.255)