Unlock the secret to finding lost items!

Researchers share insights that should help those who are particularly untidy.

Have you ever spent too much time searching for your lost keys? Retracing your steps from the start may seem like the obvious solution, but have you ever considered an alternative search strategy?

Recent insights reveal that taking a step back and starting afresh at random intervals, rather than sticking to a set routine, could be the trick to finding misplaced items more efficiently.

Search problems are ubiquitous in nature: from animals foraging for food to the search of biomolecules for targets inside living cells.  One effective search strategy is to reset the search every so often and start anew. The idea has proven useful in many different contexts, including optimizing the performance of computer algorithms, chemical reactions and biophysical processes.  In a nutshell, resetting stops the search from wandering off in the wrong direction.

Resetting has been of particular interest in the statistical physics community where it provides a paradigm of nonequilibrium dynamics: by continually restarting some complex process, the process is never allowed to equilibrate. A particularly appealing mathematical model is diffusion, perhaps the simplest and most common process in nature, with the addition of resetting.

Researchers Professor Martin Evans and Dr Somrita Ray (Elizabeth Gardner Fellow) wanted to investigate when resetting a diffusive search at random intervals (stochastic resetting) is advantageous compared to resetting at fixed intervals (sharp restart). They were able to prove mathematically and substantiate with computer simulations that stochastic resetting is the superior strategy when the distribution of the target of the search is broad. Moreover, they provided a formula determining the target distribution to which a resetting protocol is best suited.

To understand the target distribution, let’s return to the everyday example of searching for one's keys (the target). Usually when we go to retrieve our keys, they are not there and are instead located at some random distance from where they should be, how far depending on how untidy we are.  Thus being untidy implies a broad target distribution.

We conclude that for those who tend to be on the untidy side, applying this random reset method can drastically improve your chances of locating lost items!