Events

Date: 5 November 2026   Time: 13:00 - 14:00     

Location: MB-503

Stochastic search is ubiquitous in physical and artificial realms. In these settings, the number of 'searchers' is rarely constant: new agents may be recruited while others can abandon the search. Despite the prevalence of these dynamics, their combined influence on search times remains largely unexplored. In this talk we will introduce frameworks for studying stochastic search in which agents progressively join and leave the process, a mechanism we term 'dynamic redundancy and mortality'. Under minimal assumptions on the underlying search dynamics, we determine the exact distribution of the first-passage time to a target region and reveal surprising connections to stochastic search with stochastic resetting, wherein a single searcher is randomly 'reset' to its initial state. We will then treat the target region as a queue, which we show has interarrival times governed by a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. This work is in collaboration with Paul C. Bressloff (Imperial), Jose Giral-Barajas (Imperial), and Aanjaneya Kumar (Santa Fe Institute).