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Race Details
Race Date: Friday, April 19, 2013
Race Time: Race starts promptly at 4:00pm
Race Place: CMU Track
Early Registration: Tuesday, April
16, 2013
Race-day Registration: 3-3:30pm on the track
Awards
Every runner will receive a
Random Distance Run T-SHIRT. Additional prizes will be awarded to the
top male and female finishers, the top student-advisor pair, the random
finisher (the person who finishes in the position specified by the two
dice rolls), and each person who correctly predicts
the two dice rolls.
Registration
To
register
for the race, sign and return this form to the address listed on
the form, or
to Wolfgang Richter's mailbox in the CSD main office (Gates 6105), or to
his office (Gates 9127). The
registration fee (cash accepted) is listed below and will be used to cover the cost of the
race t-shirts & water:
$10 if received
by Tuesday, April 16, 2013
$13 otherwise.
Members of
SCS and
ECE and their friends are invited to participate. Late registrants
may receive their t-shirts after race day. Please, please, please,
register early since it allows us to have shirts ready to hand
out on race day! This time, we are going to cap registrations at 90, so
you might not be able to register on the race day. To guarantee a spot,
register now!
How long will the
race be?
Nobody knows! All we can say
is that it will be somewhere between 1/2 mile and 3 miles (between
2 and 12 laps of the track). The exact number of laps will be specified by
the sum of two ENORMOUS FUZZY DICE rolls – one occurring just
before the start of the race, and one just before the first runner
finishes the number of laps specified by the first dice
roll.
Is there any
history to the race? Why yes! The Random Structures and Algorithms
conference has held a Random Distance Run at
its gatherings since 1983, with Paul Erdös rolling the dice at the
first race. It was started at CMU by Adam Wierman
and Rob Reeder in 2003. It was
organized by Gaurav Veda from
2007-2010. Over the years, the RDR has been written about in the
Pittsburgh
Post Gazette and the Tartan
and even filmed for a special on cmuTV.
Has anyone done a statistical analysis?
Jonathan Clark, on his own initiative, produced graphs to help you
in your own interpretation of the randomness. You have the data, and even a visualization, come up
with your own conclusions! Oh, and please join us as we take our
yearly sample from this delightful distribution in the hope that
our sample mean (currently 1.86mi, for those of you keeping score
at home) will reach the golden expected value of 1.75mi! 
That's a cool idea, but I'm not a runner...
Then come
help us out! If you are interested in helping on this years race, we
will definitely need volunteers. Email
Wolfgang
Richter (wolf@cs) to sign up.
RDR Winners |
