Farmer Brown lives in a land where farms stretch far and wide. One day he wins the lottery and wants to tell his neighbors. He tells his nearest neighbor of his good fortune. What follows is an odd sort of transmission of the news: each person who hears it (as well as farmer Brown himself) tells only his nearest neighbor, no one else.
Whenever that nearest neighbor is the person who told him the news, that branch of the transmission is closed, as there's no point in telling the person who told you, and there's no substitution of the second nearest neighbor.
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What's the probability that the only person to get the news is the one farmer Brown called himself, due to farmer Brown being his nearest neighbor's nearest neighbor?
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What's the expected number of people, besides farmer Brown, who will get the news before the transmission dies out altogether?
Consider the land where this happens an infinite plane, with each farmer a randomly placed point with uniform probability density.
(In reply to
Some thoughts? by Kenny M)
A point can't have more than one nearest neighbor--there's probability zero that two would be exactly the same distance apart.
As for the uniform distribution: any density would be applicable, but for the sake of concreteness, say any arbitrary area of one square kilometer has an expected number of points as 5, following a Poisson distribution.
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Posted by Charlie
on 2025-03-23 21:39:07 |
re: Some thoughts?
