Here’s an equivalent problem that may make more sense: you have a group of soldiers on a battlefield without access to GPS equipment, and they need to figure out where they are in relation to each other… they each have radios, and can measure propagation latency between each other, telling them linear distance separating each of them, but telling them nothing about directionality, and from that data they need to construct a map of their locations.
Here’s an equivalent problem that may make more sense: you have a group of soldiers on a battlefield without access to GPS equipment, and they need to figure out where they are in relation to each other… they each have radios, and can measure propagation latency between each other, telling them linear distance separating each of them, but telling them nothing about directionality, and from that data they need to construct a map of their locations.