Many-player rendezvous search: Stick together or split and meet?

Rendezvous search finds the strategies that players should use in order to find one another when they are separated in a region. Previous papers have concentrated on the case where there are two players searching for one anot her. This paper looks at the problem when there are more than two players a nd concentrates on what they should do if some but not all of them meet tog ether. It looks at two strategies-the stick together one and the split up a nd meet again one. This paper shows that the former is optimal among the cl ass of strategies which require no memory and are stationary, and it gives a method of calculating the expected rendezvous time under it. However, sim ulation results comparing both strategies suggest that in most situations t he split up and meet again strategy which requires some memory leads to fas ter expected rendezvous times. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.