Related papers: How Smart Should a Forager Be?
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 consider a robotic vehicle tasked with gathering information by visiting a set of spatially-distributed data sources, the locations of which are not known a priori, but are discovered on the fly. We assume a first-order robot dynamics…
Residential mobility is deeply entangled with all aspects of hunter-gatherer life ways, and is therefore an issue of central importance in hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherers vary widely in annual rates of residential mobility, and…
Dynamic game theory is an increasingly popular tool for modeling multi-agent, e.g. human-robot, interactions. Game-theoretic models presume that each agent wishes to minimize a private cost function that depends on others' actions. These…
Assume that a target is known to be present at an unknown point among a finite set of locations in the plane. We search for it using a mobile robot that has imperfect sensing capabilities. It takes time for the robot to move between…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
When navigating complex environments, animals often combine multiple strategies to mitigate the effects of external disturbances. These modalities often correspond to different sources of information, leading to speed-accuracy trade-offs.…
Bacteria are perhaps the simplest living systems capable of complex behaviour involving sensing and coherent, collective behaviour an example of which is the phenomena of swarming on agar surfaces. Two fundamental questions in bacterial…
Foraging is a widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…
Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…
Imagine searching a collection of coins for quarters ($0.25$), dimes ($0.10$), nickels ($0.05$), and pennies ($0.01$)-a hybrid foraging task where observers look for multiple instances of multiple target types. In such tasks, how do target…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
A population is said to have an ideal free distribution in a spatially heterogeneous but temporally constant environment if each of its members have chosen a fixed spatial location in a way that optimizes its individual fitness, allowing…
Optimal random foraging strategy has gained increasing concentrations. It is shown that L\'evy flight is more efficient compared with the Brownian motion when the targets are sparse. However, standard L\'evy flight generally cannot be…
A network model based on players' aspirations is proposed and analyzed theoretically and numerically within the framework of evolutionary game theory. In this model, players decide whether to cooperate or defect by comparing their payoffs…
The reward system is one of the fundamental drivers of animal behaviors and is critical for survival and reproduction. Despite its importance, the problem of how the reward system has evolved is underexplored. In this paper, we try to…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
Agriculture provides economic opportunity through innovation; helps rural America to thrive; promotes agricultural production that better nourishes Americans; and aims to preserve natural resources through healthy private working lands,…
The increased worldwide prevalence of obesity has sparked the interest of the scientific community towards tools that objectively and automatically monitor eating behavior. Despite the study of obesity being in the spotlight, such tools can…
Active inference is a normative framework for explaining behaviour under the free energy principle -- a theory of self-organisation originating in neuroscience. It specifies neuronal dynamics for state-estimation in terms of a descent on…