# Does Greed Help a Forager Survive?

## TL;DR

This paper studies how greed affects the survival time of a forager on a lattice, revealing non-monotonic relationships and unexpected peaks in lifetime depending on greed levels and dimensionality.

## Contribution

It introduces a model analyzing the impact of greed on forager survival, uncovering complex non-linear effects and surprising lifetime peaks in one-dimensional systems.

## Key findings

- Forager lifetime varies non-monotonically with greed.
- In one dimension, lifetime peaks sharply at high negative greed.
- Lifetime behavior differs between one and two dimensions.

## 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.