this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
88 points (88.6% liked)

Asklemmy

43826 readers
854 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm sure pirates knew the answer. Probably fighter pilots as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Sure. And I mean the "sufficiently small" distance is exactly the question. I mean it's not really an interesting question to ask if they're still 12 nautical miles apart... The initial distance isn't really of concern. It just has to work for any given initial state. And the next question is, are we talking about entering a ship or using cannons? Then it's either can the distance become 0 or can it get less than something.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I agree they aren't practically interesting egde cases, because in order to hit them, they're no longer meaningful for realistically describing pirate ships. At very high turning speeds, it also ceases to matter that one is 3/4 than that the other either. But at that point, we're talking about pirate ships spinning like ballerinas across the seven seas.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Feel free to extend that problem to fighter jets or ballerinas playing tag ๐Ÿ˜†

However, I'm pretty sure it's already solved. Doesn't seem difficult to prove and has had applications for centuries already. And I've played the Robots Game when I was 12 or something...