English

The asymptotics of group Russian roulette

Probability 2017-05-02 v2

Abstract

We study the group Russian roulette problem, also known as the shooting problem, defined as follows. We have nn armed people in a room. At each chime of a clock, everyone shoots a random other person. The persons shot fall dead and the survivors shoot again at the next chime. Eventually, either everyone is dead or there is a single survivor. We prove that the probability pnp_n of having no survivors does not converge as nn\to\infty, and becomes asymptotically periodic and continuous on the logn\log n scale, with period 1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1507.03805,
  title  = {The asymptotics of group Russian roulette},
  author = {Tim van de Brug and Wouter Kager and Ronald Meester},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03805},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

26 pages, 1 figure; Mathematica notebook and output file (calculated exact bounds) are included with the source files