Have you ever wondered where you will get to if you walk at random in a city ? Will you go far away or simply wander around in your neighborhood? It’s a well-known mathematical problem, usually applied in my country to people who have drunk too much.

A few days ago I thought it might be fun to watch that drunkard walk on Openstreetmap. Some quick coding with Leaflet, Overpass, Nominatim, etc., produced something I called Deambule. Every time you click on Walk, the drunkard, or let’s say the robot, walks 50 steps (where a step means going from one OSM node to the next OSM node on a way). At every corner it chooses one of the ways at random (trying to avoid directions he took very recently).

This is perfectly useless, and yet I think there’s something fascinating about it: it’s fun when the robot explores new neighborhoods and very boring when it cannot escape a public garden it has already visited several times. I might have called it Flâneur or Dérive, but the reference to Walter Benjamin or the Situationist was a little presomptuous for a robot that doesn’t even know why it is walking.

You may ask the robot to walk more on the same path, or you may start other paths around the world. Remember that all paths are shared by everybody. At the time of this writing, on path #1 the robot (green marker) has almost come back to its starting point (blue marker) after walking more than 300 km inside and outside Paris. ___ After a few hours, 15 new paths have been created, presumably by people who saw this diary entry. I removed those which do not contain any nodes except the starting point (I assume they were probably created by mistake).