How to highlight the main cities of the world with uniform coverage?

Question

data mining

There is a task to choose 2 - 3k cities all over the world, maximum in number and so that they evenly cover the populated surface. Do you know the finished base? If not, how would you solve this problem?

Answer 1

1. Introduce a penalty function that includes a) a penalty for the distance between the nearest cities (increasing quadratically or even more with distance) and b) for "not including" an existing city (increasing from its population).
2. I would take a base of 10K-20K existing cities.
3. Would apply any algorithm for optimizing the penalty function by changing the sample. Personally, I think that a family of genetic algorithms would be great.