Perfect memory is a suboptimal foraging strategy

Evolution at work, and yet another example of the need for a little bit of noise in nearly everything. I really need to re-read "The Quark and the Jaguar", which explored this need for "tooth" in non-trivial systems. It also connects to Wolfram's "Rule 30" cellular automata.

From the article:

"Their model shows that in a changing environment, revisiting old haunts on a regular basis is not the best strategy for a forager.

It turns out instead that a better approach strategy is to inject an element of randomness into a regular foraging pattern. This improves foraging efficiency by a factor of up to 7, say Boyer and Walsh."

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25283/