World Graph Visualization

In 2023, I started playing a knockoff of Wordle called Travle, where the player has several tries to guess the countries required to travel between two nonadjacent countries. After a while, I started thinking about the most challenging starting and destination countries regarding the number of intermediate countries a player would need to guess correctly.

To solve this problem, I created a graphical representation of the world's countries (and several semi-autonomous territories) and their land borders. In this representation, one can use a breadth-first search to find two connected nodes with the highest number of minimum steps to reach each other. They are Lesotho and El Salvador.

When looking at the graphical representation of international borders, I found a few things to be interesting. The Americas are connected to the old world at two points. First through French Guiana, considered a core part of France, and second through Hans Island, which, after a border dispute resolution in 2022, created a land border between Canada and Denmark. Spain maintains colonial holdings in mainland Africa. The UK also maintains territory connecting it to Spain and Cyprus, which makes Haiti and the Dominican Republic the only countries with land borders unconnected to the broader world network.