It wasn't until reading your comment that I actually looked at a soccer ball and worked out that they're not all hexagons. Now it feels stupid that I thought they were all the same shape. Funny how long some assumptions are carried - ie. forever if the situation never comes up to challenge it.

(I live in a country where other sports are more popular than soccer, hence I call it soccer not football, so my familiarity with the soccer ball itself is not as intimate as in many European countries).

If you're interested, here's how Uber solved it for their internal tooling:

https://h3geo.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PutOhe8HVNU

Nah, you just cheat a little and the error is small enough to handwave: https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2017/bridges2017-237.pdf

Classic engineer vs. mathematician mindset

Perfect is the enemy of good vs. wars are fought over disputed boundaries.

Depends on what's riding on it.

It'd be "funny" if whatever gaps in humanity's best tesselation effort are marked as no-go zones, essentially non-existent to the digital / electronic world; Un-mappable therefore illegal to inhabit; there be dragons.

Astronomers came up with a cool way to tessellate a sphere called Healpix. The tiles are quadrilateral, though, so they may not have the same freedom as hexagons in the context of a game where players can move to adjacent tiles.

https://healpix.jpl.nasa.gov/

Some code that might help with hexagons here: https://observablehq.com/@nrabinowitz/h3-tutorial-heatmap-re...

This does not seem to address the pentagon issue though?

Yes, but there exists an orientation in which all of the pentagons are over water (h3 uses this). It's impossible to create a global tessellation with only hexagons.

Check this out then, https://www.ovr.ai, uses the hexagon co-ordinate system to cover the surface of a sphere. My co-founder told me recently that this hexagon system has been in development in the academic world for about a decade.

In our spare time, our team had been discussing on an ideal way to lay some form of "grid" over Earth so we can co-ordinate Climate actions & results between providers and buyers. We wanted a system that has been done before and we can build on top of it.

Got a more specific link that discusses the actual hexagon system? And, your cookie banner is either a horrid dark pattern or broken as heck on ff/android.

Sorry, I have no idea and I have no relationship with the website.