Related papers: Normative theory of patch foraging decisions
Precisely how ecological factors influence animal social structure is far from clear. We explore this question using an agent-based model inspired by the fission-fusion society of Spider monkeys (Ateles spp). Our model introduces a…
Preserving biodiversity and ecosystem stability is a challenge that can be pursued through modern statistical mechanics modeling. Here we introduce a variational maximum entropy-based algorithm to evaluate the entropy in a minimal ecosystem…
Normative decision theory proves inadequate for modeling human responses to the social-engineering campaigns of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks. Behavioral decision theory fares better, but still falls short of capturing…
Artificially evolving foraging behavior in simulated legged animals has proved to be a notoriously difficult task. Here, we co-evolve the morphology and controller for virtual organisms in a three-dimensional physically realistic…
Game theory has been one of the most successful quantitative concepts to describe social interactions, their strategical aspects, and outcomes. Among the payoff matrix quantifying the result of a social interaction, the interaction…
In this paper, preys with stochastic evasion policies are considered. The stochasticity adds unpredictable changes to the prey's path for avoiding predator's attacks. The prey's cost function is composed of two terms balancing the…
In toxicology research, experiments are often conducted to determine the effect of toxicant exposure on the behavior of mice, where mice are randomized to receive the toxicant or not. In particular, in fixed interval experiments, one…
We propose a mathematical framework for natural selection in finite populations. Traditionally, many of the selection-based processes used to describe cultural and genetic evolution (such as imitation and birth-death models) have been…
Many natural and artificial networks evolve in time. Nodes and connections appear and disappear at various timescales, and their dynamics has profound consequences for any processes in which they are involved. The first empirical analysis…
Epochal dynamics, in which long periods of stasis in an evolving population are punctuated by a sudden burst of change, is a common behavior in both natural and artificial evolutionary processes. We analyze the population dynamics for a…
Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course correction and reorientation, often with uncertainty in sensory acquisition of information,…
Computational models of collective behavior in birds has allowed us to infer interaction rules directly from experimental data. Using a generic form of these rules we explore the collective behavior and emergent dynamics of a simulated…
Ecosystems frequently display the coexistence of diverse species under resource competition, typically resulting in skewed distributions of rarity and abundance. A potential driver of such coexistence is environmental fluctuations that…
Analyzing decision problems under uncertainty commonly relies on idealizing assumptions about the describability of the world, with the most prominent examples being the closed world and the small world assumption. Most assumptions are…
Understanding under what conditions interacting populations, whether they be plants, animals, or viral particles, coexist is a question of theoretical and practical importance in population biology. Both biotic interactions and…
A critical step in data analysis for many different types of experiments is the identification of features with theoretically defined shapes in N-dimensional datasets; examples of this process include finding peaks in multi-dimensional…
Many biological systems approach physical limits to their performance, motivating the idea that their behavior and underlying mechanisms could be determined by such optimality. Nevertheless, optimization as a predictive principle has only…
Animal behavior is shaped by a myriad of mechanisms acting on a wide range of scales, which hampers quantitative reasoning and the identification of general principles. Here, we combine data analysis and theory to investigate the…
A growing body of research indicates that structural plasticity mechanisms are crucial for learning and memory consolidation. Starting from a simple phenomenological model, we exploit a mean-field approach to develop a theoretical framework…
Gambits are central to human decision-making. Our goal is to provide a theory of Gambits. A Gambit is a combination of psychological and technical factors designed to disrupt predictable play. Chess provides an environment to study gambits…