Search with home returns provides advantage under high uncertainty
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many search processes are conducted in the vicinity of a favored location, i.e., a home, which is visited repeatedly. Foraging animals return to their dens and nests to rest, scouts return to their bases to resupply, and drones return to their docking stations to recharge or refuel. Yet, despite its prevalence, very little is known about search with home returns because its analysis is much more challenging than that of unconstrained, free-range search. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for search with home returns. This makes no assumptions on the underlying search process and is furthermore suited to treat generic return and home-stay strategies. We show that the solution to the home-return problem can then be given in terms of the solution to the corresponding free-range problem-which not only reduces overall complexity but also gives rise to a simple and universal phase-diagram for search. The latter reveals that search with home returns outperforms free-range search in conditions of high uncertainty. Thus, when living gets rough, a home will not only provide warmth and shelter but also allow one to locate food and other resources quickly and more efficiently than in its absence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it