Minimalistic behavioral rule derived from bacterial chemotaxis in a stochastic resonance setup

Abstract

Animals are able to cope with the noise, uncertainties, and complexity of the real world. Often even elementary living beings, equipped with very limited sensory organs, are able to reach regions favorable to their existence, using simple stochastic policies. In this paper we discuss a minimalistic stochastic behavioral rule, inspired from bacteria chemotaxis, which is able to increase the value of a specified evaluation function in a similar manner. In particular, we prove that, under opportune assumptions, the direction that is taken with maximum probability by an agent that follows this rule corresponds to the optimal direction. The rule does not require a specific agent dynamics, needs no memory for storing observed states, and works in generic n-dimensional spaces. It thus reveals itself interesting for the control of simple sensing robots as well.

Stochastic resonance in periodic potentials

“…Stochastic Resonance (SR) is a phenomenon exhibited by non-linear systems in which the system shows an enhanced response to an external periodic forcing in the presence of an optimal amount of noise [1][2][3]. Initially thought of as an explanation for the recurring ice ages on earth [1], presently SR finds lots of applications in diverse biological [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] and physical systems [13][14][15][16][17]. Extensive theoritical and experimental work has been done on SR [2,3].…”