Ergodic crossover in partially self-avoiding stochastic walks

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2013 Sep;88(3):032119. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.88.032119. Epub 2013 Sep 11.

Abstract

Consider a one-dimensional environment with N randomly distributed sites. An agent explores this random medium moving deterministically with a spatial memory μ. A crossover from local to global exploration occurs in one dimension at a well-defined memory value μ_{1}=log_{2}N. In its stochastic version, the dynamics is ruled by the memory and by temperature T, which affects the hopping displacement. This dynamics also shows a crossover in one dimension, obtained computationally, between exploration schemes, characterized yet by the trajectory size (N_{p}) (aging effect). In this paper we provide an analytical approach considering the modified stochastic version where the parameter T plays the role of a maximum hopping distance. This modification allows us to obtain a general analytical expression for the crossover, as a function of the parameters μ, T, and N_{p}. Differently from what has been proposed by previous studies, we find that the crossover occurs in any dimension d. These results have been validated by numerical experiments and may be of great value for fixing optimal parameters in search algorithms.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't