ArticleScience advances2021
Intermittent inverse-square Lévy walks are optimal for finding targets of all sizes.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Socioeconomic Gauging of Brown and Levy Power Motions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Efficient planning and implementation of optimal foraging strategies under energetic constraints.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Brown and Levy Steady-State Motions.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Levy Noise Affects Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Memory.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Lévy Flight Model of Gaze Trajectories to Assist in ADHD Diagnoses.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Article
- Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Lévy movements and a slowly decaying memory allow efficient collective learning in groups of interacting foragers.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Liver Environment-Imposed Constraints Diversify Movement Strategies of Liver-Localized CD8 T Cells.Journal of immunology (Baltimore, Md. : 1950) · 2022Article
- Article
- Virtual prey with Lévy motion are preferentially attacked by predatory fish.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Lévy walks are random walk processes whose step lengths follow a long-tailed power-law distribution. Because of their abundance as movement patterns of biological organisms, substantial theoretical efforts have been devoted to identifying the foraging circumstances that would make such patterns advantageous. However, despite extensive research, there is currently no mathematical proof indicating that Lévy walks are, in any manner, preferable strategies in higher dimensions than one. Here, we prove that in finite two-dimensional terrains, the inverse-square Lévy walk strategy is extremely efficient at finding sparse targets of arbitrary size and shape. Moreover, this holds even under the weak model of intermittent detection. Conversely, any other intermittent Lévy walk fails to efficiently find either large targets or small ones. Our results shed new light on the Lévy foraging hypothesis and are thus expected to affect future experiments on animals performing Lévy walks.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.