English

Does Greed Help a Forager Survive?

Populations and Evolution 2017-06-22 v2 Statistical Mechanics Biological Physics

Abstract

We investigate the role of greed on the lifetime of a random-walking forager on an initially resource-rich lattice. Whenever the forager lands on a food-containing site, all the food there is eaten and the forager can hop S\mathcal{S} more steps without food before starving. Upon reaching an empty site, the forager comes one time unit closer to starvation. The forager is also greedy---given a choice to move to an empty or to a food-containing site in its local neighborhood, the forager moves preferentially towards food. Surprisingly, the forager lifetime varies non-monotonically with greed, with different senses of the non-monotonicity in one and two dimensions. Also unexpectedly, the forager lifetime in one dimension has a huge peak for very negative greed.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.03434,
  title  = {Does Greed Help a Forager Survive?},
  author = {U. Bhat and S. Redner and O. Benichou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.03434},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures, 2-column revtex format. Version 2 is expanded in response to referee comments. For publication in PRE

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:41:38.657Z