1. Suppose you are in a boat on a circular pond 200 m in diameter when suddenly thick fog comes down and you realise you are lost and have no idea where you are relative to the shore.
What strategy should you follow in order to minimise the distance you must row to be certain of reaching the shore? What is that distance?
2. What if the pond, instead of being circular, is an equilateral triangle of side 250 m? How far might you have to row in this case?
Personal Blogs
Lost in the fog
Saturday, 11 Jan 2025, 22:53
Visible to anyone in the world
Comments
New comment
1. Immediate intuition says, go at a right angle to the direction in which you were going originally. D
That's probably not the answer, but it's the best I can do before breakfast
Jan
New comment
Well as I see it we don't know where we are, so we don't have any basis for choosing one direction over another.
Rich