English

The nerd snipers problem

Metric Geometry 2024-09-24 v2 Probability

Abstract

We correct errors that appear throughout "The vicious neighbour problem" by Tao and Wu. We seek to solve the following problem. Suppose NN nerds are distributed uniformly at random in a square region. At 3:14pm, every nerd simultaneously snipes their nearest neighbor. What is the expected proportion PNP_N of nerds who are left unscathed in the limit as NN\to\infty?

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.06068,
  title  = {The nerd snipers problem},
  author = {Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.06068},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

10 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables. Comment on DOI 10.1088/0305-4470/20/5/008 (R Tao and F Y Wu 1987 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 20 L299)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:39:14.093Z