This was a hands-on assignment given at the 4th ACM Europe Summer School on Data Science by Nikos Mamoulis in his course Spatial and multi-dimensional indexing and data analytics. I enjoyed the course a lot, as well as the assignment, and heavily recommend checking out his work. I initially did it in Python, but then also went back and did it in my programming language Zote, where I think the code looks quite good.
It would be fun to do more work in this area (for example parallelizing some of the database-cracking algorithms he presented), so I hope I will have an opportunity to work some more in this area.