We see a yellow pac-man has eaten a smaller red pac-man. The angle formed by the yellow pac-man's mouth is twice as large as the angle formed by the red pac-man's mouth.
What is the angle of the red pac-man's mouth in degrees if the ratio Area red Area yellow is minimized?
Note: If the red one gets too big the yellow one might die.
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But here's the question. If pac-man opens his mouth greater than 180, is he still pac-man?
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Yeah, that's right... looks like what happens when a snake regurgitates
A good question, but still better than just calling them sectors, right?
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Jeremy, I think the problem would be clearer if you asked for the minimum ratio of yellow to red areas, i.e., A r e a r e d A r e a y e l l l o w , instead of "ratio of their two areas", which is a bit vague.
Yeah, it's just that I initially restricted my range of attention to (0,pi/2) in order to have a proper pac-man.
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If the red pac-man has radius 1, and 2 θ is the angle of its mouth, then the yellow pac-man's radius is 2 cos θ + 1 1
The ratio of the areas simplifies to ( 2 cos θ + 1 1 ) 2 1 8 0 − θ 1 8 0 − 2 θ which is too messy to give an exact analytical solution.
Wolfram|Alpha says this is minimized if θ = 4 6 . 5 8 9 8 5 8 5 9 ∘ and so 2 θ = 9 3 . 1 7 9 9 1 7 1 8 ∘ and Geometer's sketchpad agrees.
A picture of this looks funny because the yellow pac-man's mouth is open more than 180 degrees.