Does Greed Help a Forager Survive?

Abstract

We investigate the role of greed on the lifetime of a random-walking forager on an initially resource-rich lattice. Whenever the forager lands on a food-containing site, all the food there is eaten and the forager can hop $\mathcal{S}$ more steps without food before starving. Upon reaching an empty site, the forager comes one time unit closer to starvation. The forager is also greedy---given a choice to move to an empty or to a food-containing site in its local neighborhood, the forager moves preferentially towards food. Surprisingly, the forager lifetime varies non-monotonically with greed, with different senses of the non-monotonicity in one and two dimensions. Also unexpectedly, the forager lifetime in one dimension has a huge peak for very negative greed.

5 pages, 4 figures, 2-column revtex format. Version 2 is expanded in response to referee comments. For publication in PRE

References in corpus (2)

• Intermittent random walks for an optimal search strategy: One-dimensional case
• Depletion-Controlled Starvation of a Diffusing Forager

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