Wasn't it Mike Williams who wrote:
>Wasn't it Rune who wrote:
>
>>...or practically the same question formulated differently: If I have a
>>bunch of random points, how can I find the normal of the plane that is as
>>close as possible to as many as possible of the points? (The average
>>distance from a point to the plane should be as small as possible.)
>
>I'd try to extend the traditional line fitting technique from 2d into
>3d. This technique actually minimises the average of the squares of the
>distances, which produces a better looking fit than minimising the
>average distances.

It turns out that the 3d case is a bit trickier than 2d, the best
information about how to do it in 3d that I've managed to find is at

http://www.efunda.com/math/leastsquares/lstsqrzrwtxy1d.cfm

I'm not going to attempt to quote it here because it's full of symbols
that aren't in the character set that I'm using.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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