Problem:
Let be the set of the points in 2012-dimensional space such that . Let be the set of points in 2012-dimensional space such that . Let be a randomly chosen point on . What is the probability that the closest point in to is a vertex of ?
Problem:
Let be the set of the points in 2012-dimensional space such that . Let be the set of points in 2012-dimensional space such that . Let be a randomly chosen point on . What is the probability that the closest point in to is a vertex of ?
Solution:
Answer:
Note that is a hypercube in 2012-dimensional space, containing the rotated hyperoctahedron . Let be a particular vertex of , and we will consider the set of points on such that is the closest point to in . Let be another point of and let be the line between and . Then in order for to be the closest point to in , it must also be so on the region of contained in . This condition is then equivalent to the projection of lying past on the line , or alternatively that lies in the opposite halfspace of defined by the hyperplane perpendicular to and passing through . This can be written algebraically as . Therefore, is the closest point to if and only if for all in .
Note that these conditions do not depend on where is on the line, so for each line intersecting nontrivially, let us choose such that lies on the hyperplane containing all the vertices of except for and . We can further see that the conditions are linear in , so them holding for all in is equivalent to them holding on the vertices of the region , which are simply the vertices of except for and . Let us now compute what these conditions look like.
Without loss of generality, let and . Then the equation is of the form , which we can rewrite as . For the other choices of , we get the similar conditions that and also for each .
Note that if any for , then one of these conditions trivially fails, as it would require . Therefore, the only face of where can lie is the face defined by , which gives us the conditions that and , so for all . This defines a 2011-dimensional hypercube of side length 2 on the face of defined by , and we obtain similar regions on each of the other faces corresponding to the other vertices of .
Therefore, the volume of the set of for which is closest to a vertex is and the volume of all the choices of is , so the desired probability is .