Also were talking spheroid surface distances aka geodesics here. So unless three places lie on a great circle their distances are not cummutative, since they form a geodesic triangle.
A geodesic is a locally length-minimizing curve. Equivalently, it is a path that a particle which is not accelerating would follow. In the plane, the geodesics are straight lines. On the sphere, the geodesics are great circles (like the equator). The geodesics in a space depend on the Riemannian metric, which affects the notions of distance and acceleration
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Also were talking spheroid surface distances aka geodesics here. So unless three places lie on a great circle their distances are not cummutative, since they form a geodesic triangle.
Google Earth Engine's geometry constructors build geodesic geometries by default
https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/geometries_planar...
A geodesic is a locally length-minimizing curve. Equivalently, it is a path that a particle which is not accelerating would follow. In the plane, the geodesics are straight lines. On the sphere, the geodesics are great circles (like the equator). The geodesics in a space depend on the Riemannian metric, which affects the notions of distance and acceleration