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Rowing to Shore and Then Running Away

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is in a rowboat in the center of a circular lake (black dot). has to escape from (red dot), who knows must come ashore. Although can run faster than once on land, runs times faster than can row, where . Is there a strategy for to escape?

Contributed by: Izidor Hafner (January 2014)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

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Richard F. Guy shows that can always escape when runs at most 4.6 times as fast as rows (solution 2).

Reference

[1] M. Gardner, The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006 pp. 237, 256–257.

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