10:07 PM
@flawr Once you have the distance between 3 points, you can check the relative position of every other point using triangulation
...I feel like I'm missing something.
because there's no way my answer is better than the one on the math SE
oh, I figured out where I went wrong. I was assuming there's a magic function we want to call as few times as possible, and the actual complexity of the algorithm doesn't matter :P
that said, you can do the above, and then just use a standard algorithm for finding the closest pair of points
