Antisocial settlers are building houses on a prairie that’s a perfect circle with a radius of 1 mile. Each settler wants to live as far apart from his or her nearest neighbor as possible. To accomplish that, the settlers will overcome their antisocial behavior and work together so that the average distance between each settler and his or her nearest neighbor is as large as possible.
At first, there were slated to be seven settlers. Arranging that was easy enough: One will build his house in the center of the circle, while the other six will form a regular hexagon along its circumference. Every settler will be exactly 1 mile from his nearest neighbor, so the average distance is 1 mile.
However, at the last minute, one settler cancels his move to the prairie altogether (he’s really antisocial). That leaves six settlers. Does that mean the settlers can live further away from each other than they would have if there were seven settlers? Where will the six settlers ultimately build their houses, and what’s the maximum average distance between nearest neighbors?
I approached this problem from a modeling and optimization perspective. If there are $N$ settlers and we imagine the coordinates of the settlers are $(x_i,y_i)$ for $i=1,\dots,N$ and $d_i$ is the distance between the $i^\text{th}$ settler and its nearest neighbor, then we can model the problem as follows:
\[
\begin{aligned}\underset{x,y,d\,\in\,\mathbb{R}^N}{\text{maximize}} \quad & \frac{1}{N}\sum_{i=1}^N d_i \\
\text{such that} \quad & x_i^2 + y_i^2 \le 1 &&\text{for }i=1,\dots,N\\
& (x_i-x_j)^2 + (y_i-y_j)^2 \ge d_i^2 &&\text{for }i,j=1,\dots,N\text{ and }j\ne i
\end{aligned}
\]The objective is to minimize the average distance between each settler and its nearest neighbor (the average of the $d_i$). The first constraint says that each settler must be within the circle (a distance of at most $1$ from the origin). The second constraint says that the $i^\text{th}$ settler is a distance at least $d_i$ from each of the other settlers.
The game is then to find $(x_i,y_i,d_i)$ that satisfy these constraints and maximize the objective. Broadly speaking, this is an example of a mathematical optimization problem. Unfortunately, the problem as stated is nonconvex problem because of the form of the second constraint. This means that the problem may have local maximizers that are not globally optimal. There are two ways forward:
First, we could use local search: start with randomly placed settlers, wiggle their positions in ways such that the objective continues to increase, and then stop once we can no longer improve the objective. Examples of such approaches include hill-climbing and interior-point methods. In general, such approaches only find local maxima, so we should try many random starting positions to ensure we find the best possible answer.
Second, we could use global search: these are methods that attempt to find a globally optimal solution by considering many configurations simultaneously and adding random perturbations that can “kick” a solution out of a local maximum. Examples include simulated annealing and particle swarms. These approaches tend to be much slower than local search, but they have a much better chance of finding a global optimum.
Ultimately, I used local search with several random initializations. Here is how the maximum average distance scales with the number of settlements.

The bar plot also shows how well we would do if we distributed the settlements evenly on the circumference (“all on the border”) and if we put one in the middle and the rest evenly distributed on the circumference (“one in the center”). We can also examine what the settlement distributions actually look like. Here they are:

The case $N=6$ is particularly interesting because it has a settlement that is almost in the center, but not quite. Indeed, the average minimum distance to neighbors for this case is $1.002292$, so we benefit ever so slightly by placing one settlement off-center.
We can solve for the $N=6$ case analytically as well, but the solution isn’t pretty (fair warning!) It turns out the settlements are distributed throughout the circle in the following way:

Here, $x$ is the distance between the origin and the point $A$. The other distances satisfy $z \lt y \lt x+1$, and the average distance to the nearest neighbor is therefore $\tfrac{1}{6}(1+x+2y+3z)$. Note that once we set $x$, this uniquely determines the positions of all the other points. After some messy trigonometry, we obtain the following equations relating $x$, $y$, $z$ and two auxiliary variables $p$ and $q$:
\begin{align}
y^2&=1+x-x^2-x^3\\
z^2&=1-x^2+2x\left(pq-\sqrt{1-p^2}\sqrt{1-q^2}\right) \\
p&= \tfrac{1}{2}(1-2x-x^2)\\
q&= \tfrac{1}{2}(1-x+x^2+x^3)
\end{align}We can eliminate $\{y,z,p,q\}$ and solve for the average distance $\bar d = \frac{1+x+2y+3z}{6}$ as a function of $x$ alone:
\[
\bar d = \frac{x+1}{12} \left(2+4 \sqrt{1-x}+3 \sqrt{2}\sqrt{1-x} \sqrt{\left(x^3+2 x^2-x+2\right)-x \sqrt{x+3} \sqrt{x^3+x^2-x+3}} \right)
\]We can then plot this function of $x$, and we get the following curve:

Interestingly, this function reaches its maximum just a bit after $x=0$. Zooming in, we can see more clearly:

The maximum occurs at about $x=0.0555108$ and the maximum value is $1.00229$, just as we found before. If we try to solve for this analytically by taking the derivative of this function, setting it equal to zero, and eliminating rationals, we obtain the following result… That the optimal $x$ a root of the following $30^\text{th}$ order polynomial:
\begin{align}
x^{30}&+\tfrac{152}{9} x^{29}+\tfrac{9259}{81} x^{28}+\tfrac{6851}{18} x^{27}+\tfrac{383363 }{648}x^{26}+\tfrac{1999495} {5832}x^{25}\\
&+\tfrac{43478263}{52488} x^{24}+\tfrac{75726373}{23328} x^{23}+\tfrac{3282369305}{1679616} x^{22}-\tfrac{31642768891}{7558272} x^{21}\\
&+\tfrac{367775655235}{136048896} x^{20}+\tfrac{392027905801}{34012224} x^{19}-\tfrac{2016793647847}{136048896} x^{18}-\tfrac{1258157703385}{68024448} x^{17}\\
&+\tfrac{4545130566235}{136048896} x^{16}-\tfrac{22059424877}{17006112} x^{15}-\tfrac{8448216227365}{136048896} x^{14}+\tfrac{2878062707167}{68024448} x^{13}\\
&+\tfrac{7398046956073}{136048896} x^{12}-\tfrac{312655708903}{3779136} x^{11}+\tfrac{17266856539}{1679616} x^{10}+\tfrac{63670102441}{839808} x^9\\
&-\tfrac{29827845749}{559872} x^8-\tfrac{541401565}{23328} x^7+\tfrac{619158287}{23328} x^6+\tfrac{6168305}{2592} x^5\\
&-\tfrac{156285}{32} x^4-\tfrac{5153}{36} x^3+\tfrac{3923}{12} x^2+\tfrac{45}{2} x-\tfrac{35}{16}
\end{align}Yuck! Here is what you get if you plot this polynomial; as expected, there is a root at $x=0.0555108$.

Great write-up. It’s interesting that this particular metric (average nearest neighbor distance) admits asymmetric solutions, where I think something like average pairwise distance will not (?).
Yes, the asymmetry in solutions is affected by the choice of metric. I compared some additional metrics here: https://twitter.com/LaurentLessard/status/1072167362873491456
You can see there that average pairwise distance is highly symmetric (and rather uninteresting).
“Yuck!” is right. I got only as far as recognizing that the house in the middle would have to be displaced slightly from the center in a direction opposite from one of the perimeter houses. But my resulting “solution” was off because I still assumed that the five houses on the perimeter would have to form a regular pentagon to maximize average distances to the nearest neighbor, an assumption I now see is completely wrong.
Nice job, Laurent!
I found the same solution, but only for 6 settlers, and not analytically. I used a simple grid search over the displacement distance and angles of the two pentagon points (other two placed with symmetry). Follow “Antisocial Settlers” link from https://sites.google.com/view/msbits if you wish to see.
Fantastic write up, Laurent.
Laurent,
Fantastic write up!
I solved the problem too, but only for the case of 6 settlers, and not analytically. I used a grid search over the displacement of the center point and the angles of two pentagon vertices (using symmetry for the others). You can follow the link to “Antisocial Settlers” at https://sites.google.com/view/msbits to see the details.
What am I missing? Looking at the diagram, how can z > 1 if x > 0? I notice that in the published solution on fivethirtyeight, z isn’t even shown.
You are correct that $z \lt 1$. But remember the task is to optimize the average of the nearest-neighbor distances. For some settlers (i.e. Settlers B,C,F in the diagram), the nearest-neighbor distance is greater than 1, for the rest (Settlers A,D,E, it’s less than 1). But these distances are such that the average of all of them is greater than 1.
Ah. Got it! Thank you. I knew the problem (as I understood it) was far too simple for a Riddler Classic but I just couldn’t see where I was going wrong. Average was indeed the key word. I need to revise my comprehension skills.