The rendezvous dilemma can be formulated in this way:

Two young people have a date in a park they have never been to before. Arriving separately in the park, they are both surprised to discover that it is a huge area and consequently they cannot find one another. In this situation each person has to choose between waiting in a fixed place in the hope that the other will find them, or else starting to look for the other in the hope that they have chosen to wait somewhere.

If they both choose to wait, of course, they will never meet. If they both choose to walk there are chances that they meet and chances that they do not. If one chooses to wait and the other chooses to walk, then there is a theoretical certainty that they will meet eventually; in practice, though, it may take too long for it to be guaranteed. The question posed, then, is: what strategies should they choose to maximize their probability of meeting?

Examples of this class of problems are known as rendezvous problems.

As well as being problems of theoretical interest, rendezvous problems include real-world problems with applications in the fields of synchronization

Synchronization

Synchronization is timekeeping which requires the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. The familiar conductor of an orchestra serves to keep the orchestra in time....

, operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 design, operations research

Operations research

Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...

, and even search and rescue

Search and rescue

Search and rescue is the search for and provision of aid to people who are in distress or imminent danger.The general field of search and rescue includes many specialty sub-fields, mostly based upon terrain considerations...

 operations planning.

See also

• Coordination game
  Coordination game
  In game theory, coordination games are a class of games with multiple pure strategy Nash equilibria in which players choose the same or corresponding strategies...
  
  
• Dining philosophers problem
  Dining philosophers problem
  In computer science, the dining philosophers problem is an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them....
  
  
• Probabilistic algorithm
• Sleeping barber problem
  Sleeping barber problem
  In computer science, the sleeping barber problem is a classic inter-process communication and synchronization problem between multiple operating system processes...
  
  
• Superrationality
  Superrationality
  The concept of superrationality was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, in his article series and book "Metamagical Themas"...
  
  
• Symmetry breaking
  Symmetry breaking
  Symmetry breaking in physics describes a phenomenon where small fluctuations acting on a system which is crossing a critical point decide the system's fate, by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken. To an outside observer unaware of the fluctuations , the choice will appear arbitrary...
  
  

External links

• E.J. Anderson, R.R. Weber. The rendezvous problem on discrete locations
• Tracy Truong. Exploration a two sided rendezvous search problem using genetic algorithms.
• http://epubs.siam.org/sam-bin/dbq/article/24919