little math problem October 2018

[pier4r]

Sharing the question from "fermat's library" on twitter (n1) and rephrasing the context a bit.

On a planet, with a relatively friendly surface, two rovers are landed but they end in two different places (they cannot see each other directly). Communications between the rovers is impossible (unless they are in line of sight), and they are programmed to first find each other.

Which "find the other rover" strategy would you program in them and why? What is the expected time to find each other?
If you need a planet/celestial body as reference (for size not location), say the moon.





n1: social network, even after all the machine learning / ai hype, are still offering relatively dismal recommendations that fit one's niche interests. Therefore I use the occasion to suggest Fermat's library on Twitter. In general on Twitter I found better feeds than on FB. FB has more potential being more expressive (you know, thousands of characters in a post), but most of the groups/pages are inactive or private or even more difficult to find. Other SN are even worse, like youtube. On youtube with recommendations alone the hpcalc.org channel is impossible to find.