Those maniacs!

Calculus Level 4

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” ― George Carlin

Let's model the speeds of cars on a multilane highway as normally distributed with a mean of 100 km/h and standard deviation 7 km/h. Every car is using cruise control and traffic is light enough that everyone can pass without adjusting their speed.

You are also driving on this highway at precisely 100 km/h. What is the most likely speed of the next car that passes you?

Give your answer to the nearest whole number of km/hr.


The answer is 107.

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1 solution

Jeremy Galvagni
Dec 23, 2018

The likelihood of a car passing you (or you passing it) is directly proportional to its speed. You will never be passed by a car going your speed. Intuitively, if there were a bunch of cars going 1 and 2 km/h faster than you, twice as many 2's would pass you.

So we can multiply the speed distribution by k x kx to get a function that models the proportion of cars passing you by speed. For simplicy, use a standard normal distrbution:

p ( x ) = k x 1 2 π e 1 2 x 2 p(x) = kx \cdot \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}} e^{-\frac{1}{2}x^{2}}

A plot of this function shows what we'd expect. For x > 0 x>0 there is a bulge of cars going a fair amount faster than you. Even though most cars are goiong nearly your speed, you don't see them much. Even though very fast cars will pass you, there are fewer of them. The maximum appears to be at 1 standard deviation. Let's confirm this:

p ( x ) = k 2 π ( e 1 2 x 2 x 2 e 1 2 x 2 ) p'(x)=\frac{k}{\sqrt{2\pi}} \left(e^{-\frac{1}{2}x^{2}}-x^{2}e^{-\frac{1}{2}x^{2}}\right)

Setting p ( x ) = 0 p'(x)=0

( 1 x 2 ) e 1 2 x 2 = 0 (1-x^{2})e^{-\frac{1}{2}x^{2}}=0

x = ± 1 x=\pm 1

So the car passing you most are going one standard deviation faster than you, or 107 \boxed{107} km/h.

Also, the cars you pass most are only going 93 93

I'd approach the problem in a different way. The MMSE estimate of the cars passing by me is simply E ( X X > μ ) \mathbb{E}(X|X>\mu) , where X N ( μ , σ 2 ) X\sim N(\mu,\sigma^2) , which can be explicitly computed to be μ + 2 π σ \mu + \sqrt{\frac{2}{\pi}}\sigma . The final answer comes out to be 105.58 105.58 , rounded to 106 106 kmph.

Abhishek Sinha - 2 years, 5 months ago

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I specifically didn't ask for the expected, or average, speed. The problem asks for the most likely speed.

Jeremy Galvagni - 2 years, 5 months ago

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