Make the US land area ~20% larger.

Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire eastern seaboard.

Randomly place 50,000 shoe boxes up and down the entire western seaboard.

Send them in straight lines towards the other side of the country.

See if any collide. Almost certainly none of them will. Edit: They will almost certainly

For reference, if you placed all 50k boxes next to each other on the same beach, it would be about 10 miles wide. The total shoreline on either side would be ~1800 miles wide.

And that's only 2D.

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hatthew 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

By my calculations there will be an average of 500 collisions, no? Each shoebox has an effective width of 2 feet, and with 50k of them that's about 1% density. With 50k in the other direction, and about a 1% collision rate, that's 500 collisions.

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WarmWash 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Seems like you're right, I didn't actually run through the statistics and just went with intuition. Yikes

	▲	hatthew 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah my intuition was the same; if I had 1 second to make a guess I probably would have said 1% chance of >0 collisions

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thomascountz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is funnily oddly specific.

	▲	woah 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Spoken like someone who's never placed a shoebox on a seaboard