self-avoiding random angles

An apparently easy riddle from The Riddler this week: given N random half-lines starting from a N-S segment, what is the probability that none ever intersect? If m ½-lines are on the same side of the segment, they will not intersect when their angle with the segment is decreasing with the longitude of the endpoint of this ½-line on the segment. Assuming that drawing a ½-line at random is akin to uniformely drawing an angle on (0,π), this no X’ing event happens when the m angles are properly ordered, a 1/m! event. Independently, the probability for the segments on the other side is 1/(N-m)! The joint probability is thus

\displaystyle\sum_{m=0}^N {N\choose m}\frac{1}{2^N} \frac{1}{m!(N-m)!}=\frac{(2N)!}{2^N(N!)^3}

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: