# Starvation Dynamics of a Greedy Forager

## TL;DR

This paper explores the complex starvation dynamics of a greedy forager in a food environment, revealing non-monotonic lifetime dependence on greed and unexpected benefits of negative greed in one dimension.

## Contribution

It introduces a detailed model of a greedy forager with preferential movement, analyzing how greed affects survival and food consumption through analytic, heuristic, and numerical methods.

## Key findings

- Forager lifetime depends non-monotonically on greed.
- Negative greed can significantly increase forager lifetime in one dimension.
- The model reveals counterintuitive effects of greed on survival dynamics.

## Abstract

We investigate the dynamics of a greedy forager that moves by random walking in an environment where each site initially contains one unit of food. Upon encountering a food-containing site, the forager eats all the food there and can subsequently hop an additional $\mathcal{S}$ steps without food before starving to death. Upon encountering an empty site, the forager goes hungry and comes one time unit closer to starvation. We investigate the new feature of forager greed; if the forager has a choice between hopping to an empty site or to a food-containing site in its nearest neighborhood, it hops preferentially towards food. If the neighboring sites all contain food or are all empty, the forager hops equiprobably to one of these neighbors. Paradoxically, the lifetime of the forager can depend non-monotonically on greed, and the sense of the non-monotonicity is opposite in one and two dimensions. Even more unexpectedly, the forager lifetime in one dimension is substantially enhanced when the greed is negative; here the forager tends to avoid food in its local neighborhood. We also determine the average amount of food consumed at the instant when the forager starves. We present analytic, heuristic, and numerical results to elucidate these intriguing phenomena.