What does the word "increments" mean in the following sentence?
The programmer spent many months making an algorithm to map our world in 20-foot-square increments.
I looked up the word in dictionaries, but couldn't find any helpful meanings.
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Sign up to join this communityWhat does the word "increments" mean in the following sentence?
The programmer spent many months making an algorithm to map our world in 20-foot-square increments.
I looked up the word in dictionaries, but couldn't find any helpful meanings.
Lexico "increments":
An increase or addition, especially one of a series on a fixed scale.
Therefore it means the programmer is building the world one "block" at a time, in this case a 20 foot by 20 foot square.
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The algorithm will "place" these 20 foot square blocks one at a time to build the entire world!
The programmer spent months writing an algorithm to map the world in (very many very small) 20-foot-square patches.
"Increments" might not be the right word here, though it's understandable. It would be correct if the algorithm added the patches to the map one at a time - that is, incrementally.
It means that the map is constructed from squares 20 feet on the side. It may additionally mean that he extended the algorithm by squares of that size over the multiple-month interval, but that is not clear from the context.
"Pieces" would be a synonym for "increments" in this case.