Tiny particles like pollen grains move constantly, pushed and pulled by environmental forces. To study this motion, physicists use a "random walk" model—a system in which every step is determined by a random process. Random ...
Mathematics
Mar 13, 2024
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83
If you've ever watched an ant searching for food, you probably assumed that they were just covering ground in a random fashion. But a study by researchers reporting in the journal iScience on January 30 now finds that at ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 30, 2023
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22
In physics, a very intuitive way of describing the evolution of a system proceeds via the specification of functions of the spatiotemporal coordinates. Yet, there often exist other degrees of freedom in terms of which the ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 6, 2020
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9
Some people like to take random walks through the woods, while others might stroll through their own neighborhood. In the world of math, a random walk is in fact more random than this; it would be the equivalent of flipping ...
Mathematics
Mar 27, 2020
0
76
Randomness governs many things, from the growth of cell colonies and the agglomeration of polymers to the shapes of tendrils that form when you pour cream into a cup of coffee.
Optics & Photonics
Dec 24, 2019
0
463
How do you prove something? What even is proof?
Mathematics
Jun 21, 2019
3
3
Ants, it turns out, are extremely good at estimating the concentration of other ants in their vicinity. This ability appears to play a role in several communal activities, particularly in the voting procedure whereby an ant ...
Computer Sciences
Jul 13, 2016
0
46
(Phys.org)—Decision making in an enormous range of tasks involves the accumulation of evidence in support of different hypotheses. One of the enduring models of evidence accumulation is the Markov random walk (MRW) theory, ...
(Phys.org) —A small team of mathematicians with Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, has come up with a way to study a network's resistance to failure. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of ...
