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Stand behind your friend


BMAD
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There is a crowd of people in a room. Each person is asked to select some other person in the room (without telling anyone). At a signal, every person tries to approach the selected person and stand behind his/her back. What patter would emerge when "the dust settles"?

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I got sort of a combination of the answers given thus far. There will be several "islands" of people, each composed of a circle of people (or just two people standing back to back) and then trees branching off the circle.

Edited by gavinksong
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A tree structure.

Some people would not have been chosen.
They would be the leaf nodes of the tree branches.

Note, since they have chosen someone, there are not isolated persons.

Some people would have been chosen by more than one other person.
They would be branch points.

Everyone else would have been chosen by exactly one other person.
They would form the body of each branch.

Some branches will be re-entrant (cyclical.).

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At least if you only need to stand anywhere along the line behind the chosen person, and not necessarily immediately behind them and having to squeeze in with multiple people.

Yes, it's a different result then. I took the "directly behind" interpretation.

It also took a second to see "patter" meant "pattern"

I'm thinking there is further richness (or simplicity) in the solution,

my answer was in the manner of first thoughts.

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At least if you only need to stand anywhere along the line behind the chosen person, and not necessarily immediately behind them and having to squeeze in with multiple people.

Yes, it's a different result then. I took the "directly behind" interpretation.

It also took a second to see "patter" meant "pattern"

I'm thinking there is further richness (or simplicity) in the solution,

my answer was in the manner of first thoughts.

Yes, the OP intended the individuals to move directly behind the person they identified.

The answer has been given by one of the participants here but i will hold off a little longer in siding with a particular answer to allow some additional thinking on the problem.

Edited by BMAD
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