Old NID
120427
Rhett Allain, Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, was fascinated by this bit in Nautilus...
If two statisticians were to lose each other in an infinite forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk more or less randomly, which would give them the best chance of finding each other
...so he set out to clear that up and basically do what no statistician, mathematician or all of the brains at UPS have really been able to do; figure out whether a random walk is the best way to put together two lost objects.
Conclusion: Being drunk helps.
I suppose his next article will need to be, how likely is it that two statisticians will randomly choose the same search pattern?
How Should Two Lost People Find Each Other? By Rhett Allain, Wired science blogs
