Lévy-like behaviour in deterministic models of intelligent agents exploring heterogeneous environments

D Boyer, O Miramontes, H Larralde
2009 Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical  
Many studies on animal and human movement patterns report the existence of scaling laws and power-law distributions. Whereas a number of random walk models have been proposed to explain observations, in many situations individuals actually rely on mental maps to explore strongly heterogeneous environments. In this work we study a model of a deterministic walker, visiting sites randomly distributed on the plane and with varying weight or attractiveness. At each step, the walker minimizes a
more » ... on that depends on the distance to the next unvisited target (cost) and on the weight of that target (gain). If the target weight distribution is a power-law, p(k)∼ k^-β, in some range of the exponent β, the foraging medium induces movements that are similar to Lévy flights and are characterized by non-trivial exponents. We explore variations of the choice rule in order to test the robustness of the model and argue that the addition of noise has a limited impact on the dynamics in strongly disordered media.
doi:10.1088/1751-8113/42/43/434015 fatcat:hbki65tcqzcyjgnukcp66vygly