You will win $100 million if you complete a special task. 25 random adults within five miles of you will attempt to capture you to get the money themselves. All you have to do is avoid being captured by them for 24 hours and you’ll get the money. They know your name, appearance and address. You get a 10 minute head start.
How would you avoid capture for 24 hours and where would you go?
Round 1: The 25 people aren’t working together to find and stop you.
Round 2: The 25 people are working together to find and stop you.
I’d simply pick a random direction and drive until I got too tired to continue. Then I’d find somewhere to hide on foot until the day was over.
Assuming we’re allowed to leave the 5-mile radius, then first thing I’m doing is simply the same as what you said: I’m getting in the car and driving. They don’t know my car license plate. With a 10-minute head start, I’d already be on the highways and as long as I never stop and keep going at a fairly high speed, they’d have a hard time catching me in their vehicles. The only time I’d be vulnerable to capture would be when I have to stop to refuel my car, but I’d do that as fast as possible. And if I can bring a friend or family member, I wouldn’t even need to stop for a nap. I would sleep in the car while they took their turn driving.
It might be more of a challenge if the rules did NOT permit the target to flee the 5-mile radius.
Drive to someone’s house in another state & spend the night there making sure to use the toll-free option so my plate doesn’t get picked up by a reader. Directions via my Garmin so that phone is off/in airplane mode so I can’t get tracked that way, either. Would head out in a direction other than my main direction of travel to throw off anyone who might see me leaving & hit the ATM near home so that I could pay cash for food/fuel.
Without some extra rules or aspects, this sounds kind of trivial. 25 random people probably have no special training or tech access among them to find me and aren’t empowered to do anything special. So drive six-plus miles away, find a Holiday Inn and spend the next 23 hours watching hotel cable. You’re outside the radius for the (improbable) odds that a hotel employee is an opponent and no one is going to be running your plates, checking your credit card transactions for clues or flashing your plate numbers over the highway like if you were running from the cops.
If you’re in an urban or suburban area, twenty-five people within five miles of you (radius, I assume) means there’s 25 people within a nearly 80 sq mile area looking for you even if you never left the area. Without access to most buildings or other properties, I don’t see how anyone pulls it off aside from dumb luck. Allowing you to leave the area, forget about it.
If you’re in a large enough city, drive to the airport, park in one of the long-term lots and just lay down in the back for a day. Don’t get on the airport shuttle, don’t go into the terminal, just curl up and sleep.
Alternately, knock on your next door neighbor’s door and offer them $1 million to hide you for 24 hours.
Not quite the same, but the movie was Self Reliance.
The rules of the game stipulate that Tommy must survive 30 days while being hunted by hunters attempting to kill him. Should he survive, he will receive one million dollars.
I’d spend the night at a friend’s house, as mentioned above.
Upon starting my escape, I’d use my phone to call a trusted friend (Friend A) and instruct Friend A to call another trusted friend (Friend B) to arrange for their garage door to be open with a parking space available. Friend A would then text me once the arrangement is confirmed.
After confirming with Friend A, I’d immediately dispose of my phone to avoid any GPS tracking. I’d remove the SIM card and battery, and throw them out separately to ensure the device is completely untraceable.
Then I’d take several erratic turns and drive through less-traveled side streets to throw off any potential tail. I’d avoid major roads and highways where pursuers might expect me to go.
Once confident that I’m not being followed, I’d head directly to Friend B’s house. Upon arrival, I’d quickly pull into the garage, close the door behind me, and move into the house to stay out of sight.
By using this method, I’d minimize the risk of being tracked through technology and ensure that my movements are unpredictable, making it much harder for any of the 25 pursuers to find me.
As others have said, this would be pretty easy if I don’t have to stay in the target area. I make a quick run for my car and start driving to get away from my house. I’ll drive to a nearby city and check into a random hotel for two nights. I’ll spend twenty-four hours in the hotel room watching TV and then I’ll drive home a very rich man.
It would be a little more difficult if I can’t leave the five mile circle. Or if they have the make of my car and my license number.
To make matters even harder for the pursuers, they have to take into account the fact that you might be hiding in your own house (even though that would be a really dumb thing for you to do.) They’d have to spend maybe half an hour, or an hour, searching your house itself to make sure you aren’t still there.
That amount of time is even more of a head start. By the time they certify your house as no longer having you as its occupant, you’d be 40 miles away from them already; an insurmountable lead.
Grab my passport, drive to Canada on country roads, cross the border. Not having a passport (in hand, or at all) would knock most of my pursuers out of contention.
Drive to the next county and get myself thrown in jail? (To avoid the remote possibility of a cop or corrections employee within my 5 mile radius being one of the people tasked with capturing me?)
This scenario is a little too easy as it is. It would be more interesting if there was the caveat that all 25 people have been surveilling me for the past week, or something of that nature.
In this, more dire, scenario, the jail gambit might be the best shot.
In 10 minutes I could be out of (or very nearly) a 5 mile radius - just randomly picking progressively less traveled roads, always headed away from home. Unless someone by pure chance got me in the first couple minutes. I think they effectively have 0% chance.
If staying within the 5 mile radius, drive for 5 minutes - park in a crowded lot (seems like it would likely take hours to even find that), walk into into a wooded area and move along it away from the car.
Realistically, the odds are minuscule that someone out of 25 random people has the ability to track your phone so all you’re doing by flinging your phone into the ocean is making the next 23 hours that much more boring. On the other hand, I guess once you have a hundred million bucks you can buy a new phone anyway.
To flip it around, if you were one of the 25 opponents, how would you find this person? After checking the house and making sure they weren’t hiding under the bed, you’d probably run out of worthwhile options in a hurry. Even if you had access to other people who could do something, I doubt most people in those positions would risk their careers or legal action for “maybe sorta if I find this guy you might get some money” given the odds.
Yeah, the OP’s premise would have been more challenging if he had asked if you could evade some team or agency that has government-level search/tracking resources for 24 hours.
Private citizens have almost no means to find you if they haven’t caught sight of you within a few hundred yards of your house, frankly. If you drove your car for just 1 hour, you could already be anywhere within a 2,500-square mile area.
In fact, even if the question were, “If the FBI put all of its full might into finding you within 3 days,” it might still be a 50-50 chance.
I agree that the challenge seems extremely easy for the hunted to win. (Not least because I live five minutes from an international border, making it trivial to get away.)
I would adjust the scenario like this: Increase the number of people hunting you to 100. They’re not just randomly distributed in the starting area; instead, they’re arranged in an evenly spaced ring, like a giant cordon with you at the center. If they’re half a kilometer apart, that makes a circumference of 50 km, which is approximately equivalent to the original “within five miles of you” specification if we treat that as a radius. As before, there’s a ten-minute delay, where the hunters stand in their ring, before they start searching for you.
The area inside the circle is about 200 square km. That’s a lot of territory, and it gives you a couple of strategies. Get outside the ring without spotted (slipping through one of the 500 meter gaps) and the hunters need to search both inside and outside. Or allow yourself to be spotted on the way out and then try to sneak back inside the ring before the 10 minutes is up, so the hunters hopefully direct their attention somewhere you aren’t.
This seems like a much more interesting and balanced challenge to me.