What is the quickest way to find the shortest cartesian distance between two polygons

Question

I have 1 red polygon say and 50 randomly placed blue polygons - they are situated in geographical 2D space. What is the quick

Answer 1

The naive approach is to find the distance between the red and 50 blue objects -- so you're looking at 50 3d Pythagorean calculations + sorting to find the answer. That would only really work for finding the distance between center points though.

If you want arbitrary polygons, maybe your best best is a raytracing solution that emits rays from the surface of the red polygon with respect to the normal, and reports when another polygon is hit.

A hybrid might work -- we could find the distance from the center points, assuming we had some notion of the relative size of the blue polygons, we could cull the result set to the closest among those, then use raytracing to narrow down the truly closest polygon(s).