guidocram wrote:
A prey animal is in the middle of a circular pond. Outside the pond is a predator. The predator can not swim.
The movement speed of the predator is 4 times faster on land then the movement speel of the prey animal in the water.
The pray animal is faster on land.
Can the pray animal escape the predator?
On a simplistic level, if the prey animal keeps swimming in a straight line away from the predator’s starting position, it won’t reach the shore in time because the predator will have run pi times r, and pi = 3.14159…
But if the prey animal continuously changes course to swim in the opposite direction to the predator’s new position, then it may be possible for it to escape. But it’s a long time since I did maths in school and I’ve no idea what the formula would be for the distance travelled by both prey and predator in that scenario. It’s probably a calculus problem, but then again, I could be totally wrong.