Related papers: Composite random search strategies based on non-di…

Foraging is a crucial activity, yet the extent to which humans employ flexible versus rigid strategies remains unclear. This study investigates how individuals adapt their foraging strategies in response to resource distribution and…

Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…

The urban habitat provides a landscape that increases the chances of human-animal interactions, which can lead to increased human-animal conflict, but also coexistence. Some species show high levels of socio-cognitive abilities that enable…

Swarm foraging is a common test case application for multi-robot systems. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for controlling swarm robots with limited communication range and storage capacity to efficiently search for and retrieve…

We model search in settings where decision makers know what can be found but not where to find it. A searcher faces a set of choices arranged by an observable attribute. Each period, she either selects a choice and pays a cost to learn…

Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often…

Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…

We study a simple model of a foraging animal that modifies the substrate on which it moves. This substrate provides its only resource, and the forager manage it by taking a limited portion at each visited site. The resource recovers its…

Assembling optimal microbial communities is key for various applications in biofuel production, agriculture, and human health. Finding the optimal community is challenging because the number of possible communities grows exponentially with…

We address the problem where a mobile search agent seeks to find an unknown number of stationary objects distributed in a bounded search domain, and the search mission is subject to time/distance constraint. Our work accounts for false…

We study a simple model of a forager as a walk that modifies a relaxing substrate. Within it simplicity, this provides an insight on a number of relevant and non-intuitive facts. Even without memory of the good places to feed and no…

Efficient attention deployment in visual search is limited by human visual memory, yet this limitation can be offset by exploiting the environment's structure. This paper introduces a computational cognitive model that simulates how the…

Many natural processes rely on optimizing the success ratio of a search process. We use an experimental setup consisting of a simple online game in which players have to find a target hidden on a board, to investigate the how the rounds are…

This paper considers simulation-based optimization of the performance of a regime-switching stochastic system over a finite set of feasible configurations. Inspired by the stochastic fictitious play learning rules in game theory, we propose…

How to best exploit patchy resources? This long-standing question belongs to the extensively studied class of explore/exploit problems that arise in a wide range of situations, from animal foraging, to robotic exploration, and to human…

Animals typically forage in groups. Social foraging can help animals avoid predation and decrease their uncertainty about the richness of food resources. Despite this, theoretical mechanistic models of patch foraging have overwhelmingly…

Levy flights are known to be optimal search strategies in the particular case of revisitable targets. In the relevant situation of non revisitable targets, we propose an alternative model of bidimensional search processes, which explicitly…

We investigated the relationships between search efficiency, movement strategy, and non-local communication in the biological context of animal foraging. We considered situations where the members of a population of foragers perform either…

Motivated by programmatic advertising optimization, we consider the task of sequentially allocating budget across a set of resources. At every time step, a feasible allocation is chosen and only a corresponding random return is observed.…

Effective communication is crucial for deploying robots in mission-specific tasks, but inadequate or unreliable communication can greatly reduce mission efficacy, for example in search and rescue missions where communication-denied…