Related papers: Mortality, Redundancy, and Diversity in Stochastic…
We consider the ANTS problem [Feinerman et al.] in which a group of agents collaboratively search for a target in a two-dimensional plane. Because this problem is inspired by the behavior of biological species, we argue that in addition to…
This paper investigates the influence of environmental noise on the characteristic timescale of the dynamics of density-dependent populations. General results are obtained on the statistics of time spent in rarity and time spent in…
We introduce and investigate the escape problem for random walkers that may eventually die, decay, bleach, or lose activity during their diffusion towards an escape or reactive region on the boundary of a confining domain. In the case of a…
We study the similarity search problem which aims to find the similar query results according to a set of given data and a query string. To balance the result number and result quality, we combine query result diversity with query…
An ab-initio numerical study of the density-dependent, evolutionary stable dispersal strategy is presented. The simulations are based on a simple discretei generation island model with four processes: reproduction, dispersal, competition…
We use a lattice model to study first-passage time distributions of target finding events through complex environments with elongated fibers distributed with different anisotropies and volume occupation fractions. For isotropic systems and…
We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary choice tasks as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant…
Theoretical analyses of stochastic search algorithms, albeit few, have always existed since these algorithms became popular. Starting in the nineties a systematic approach to analyse the performance of stochastic search heuristics has been…
Let a lattice gas of constant density, described by the symmetric simple exclusion process, be brought in contact with a "target": a spherical absorber of radius $R$. Employing the macroscopic fluctuation theory (MFT), we evaluate the…
In this paper we study convex stochastic search problems where a noisy objective function value is observed after a decision is made. There are many stochastic search problems whose behavior depends on an exogenous state variable which…
We review some representative results for first-passage problems involving so-called mortal or evanescent walkers, i.e., walkers with a finite lifetime. The mortality constraint plays a key role in the modeling of many real scenarios, as it…
Identifying the critical domain size necessary for a population to persist is an important question in ecology. Both demographic and environmental stochasticity impact a population's ability to persist. Here we explore ways of including…
A mass ejection model in a time-dependent random environment with both temporal and spatial correlations is introduced. When the environment has a finite correlation length, individual particle trajectories are found to diffuse at large…
We study a contest in which $N$ players sequentially draw from a distribution as many times as they want at a fixed cost per draw, with no recall, and the highest accepted value wins a prize. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, the…
Search is a central problem in artificial intelligence, and breadth-first search (BFS) and depth-first search (DFS) are the two most fundamental ways to search. In this paper we derive estimates for average BFS and DFS runtime. The average…
Suppose that a point-like steady source at $x=0$ injects particles into a half-infinite line. The particles diffuse and die. At long times a non-equilibrium steady state sets in, and we assume that it involves many particles. If the…
Random walks are powerful tools to analyze spatial-temporal patterns produced by living organisms ranging from cells to humans. At the same time, it is evident that these patterns are not completely random but are results of a convolution…
We are interested in the long-time behavior of a diploid population with sexual reproduction, characterized by its genotype composition at one bi-allelic locus. The population is modeled by a 3-dimensional birth-and-death process with…
We consider a game played between a hider, who hides a static object in one of several possible positions in a bounded planar region, and a searcher, who wishes to reach the object by querying sensors placed in the plane. The searcher is a…
We analyze velocity-jump process models of persistent search for a single target on a bounded domain. The searcher proceeds along ballistic trajectories and is absorbed upon collision with the target boundary. When reaching the domain…