Related papers: Best-of-two-worlds analysis of online search
The linear search problem, informally known as the cow path problem, is one of the fundamental problems in search theory. In this problem, an immobile target is hidden at some unknown position on an unbounded line, and a mobile searcher,…
We consider the problem of searching for rays (or lines) in the half-plane. The given problem turns out to be a very natural extension of the cow-path problem that is lifted into the half-plane and the problem can also directly be motivated…
We study the classic problem in which a Searcher must locate a hidden point, also called the Hider in a network, starting from a root point. The network may be either bounded or unbounded, thus generalizing well-known settings such as…
We study the setting in which a mobile agent must locate a hidden target in a bounded or unbounded environment, with no information about the hider's position. In particular, we consider online search, in which the performance of the search…
We revisit the problem of searching for a target at an unknown location on a line when given upper and lower bounds on the distance D that separates the initial position of the searcher from the target. Prior to this work, only asymptotic…
We present results on new variants of the famous linear search (or cow-path) problem that involves an agent searching for a target with unknown position on the infinite line. We consider the variant where the agent can move either at speed…
We consider the problem of finding a door along a wall with a blind robot that neither knows the distance to the door nor the direction towards of the door. This problem can be solved with the well-known doubling strategy yielding an…
We consider the problem of searching for an object on a line at an unknown distance OPT from the original position of the searcher, in the presence of a cost of d for each time the searcher changes direction. This is a generalization of the…
We study a variant of the searching problem where the environment consists of a known terrain and the goal is to obtain visibility of an unknown target point on the surface of the terrain. The searcher starts on the surface of the terrain…
We study online competitive algorithms for the \emph{line chasing problem} in Euclidean spaces $\reals^d$, where the input consists of an initial point $P_0$ and a sequence of lines $X_1,X_2,...,X_m$, revealed one at a time. At each step…
We introduce and study the general setting of weighted search in which a number of targets, each with a certain weight, are hidden in a star-like environment that consists of $m$ infinite, concurrent rays, with a common origin. A mobile…
Though competitive analysis is often a very good tool for the analysis of online algorithms, sometimes it does not give any insight and sometimes it gives counter-intuitive results. Much work has gone into exploring other performance…
Inspired by the diverse set of technologies used in underground object detection and imaging, we introduce a novel multimodal linear search problem whereby a single searcher starts at the origin and must find a target that can only be…
Though competitive analysis has been a very useful performance measure for the quality of online algorithms, it is recognized that it sometimes fails to distinguish between algorithms of different quality in practice. A number of…
We carry out a comparative study on the problem for a walker searching on several typical complex networks. The search efficiency is evaluated for various strategies. Having no knowledge of the global properties of the underlying networks…
We study $p$-Faulty Search, a variant of the classic cow-path optimization problem, where a unit speed robot searches the half-line (or $1$-ray) for a hidden item. The searcher is probabilistically faulty, and detection of the item with…
We study the problem of searching for a hidden target in an environment that is modeled by an edge-weighted graph. A sequence of edges is chosen starting from a given root vertex such that each edge is adjacent to a previously chosen edge.…
We revisit the linear search problem where a robot, initially placed at the origin on an infinite line, tries to locate a stationary target placed at an unknown position on the line. Unlike previous studies, in which the robot travels along…
Several well-studied online resource allocation problems can be formulated in terms of infinite, increasing sequences of positive values, in which each element is associated with a corresponding allocation value. Examples include problems…
Consider search on an infinite line involving an autonomous robot starting at the origin of the line and an oblivious moving target at initial distance $d \geq 1$ from it. The robot can change direction and move anywhere on the line with…