The ubiquity of exploration vs exploitation

Some musings.

Overview

In Hills et al. (2015), the authors provided some concrete examples of how the trade-off between exploration and exploitation¹ is such a unique phenomenon across all disciplines and activities.

¹ There are of course different names for this trade-off, e.g., “convergent vs. divergent”, “precision vs. recall”, “bias vs variance”, etc.

Inforamtion Forgaing Theory

Connections between Information Forgaing Theory and Animal Foragin Theory

In Pirolli and Card (1995), the authors introduced a model of how people search for information. This model is heavily modelled after XXX

Pirolli and Card are not the only people who made that connection. Around the same time, Sandstrom (1994) published a paper in the Library Quarterly about how …

Animal Foraging

Source: https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~bio310/W303Tfiles/functional_06W.pdf

This is the Holling’s Disk Equation model² model.

² also known as “functional-response”

Search and Bandits

Hills, Thomas T., Peter M. Todd, David Lazer, A. David Redish, and Iain D. Couzin. 2015. “Exploration Versus Exploitation in Space, Mind, and Society.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19 (1): 46–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.10.004.

Pirolli, Peter, and Stuart Card. 1995. “Information Foraging in Information Access Environments.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’95, 51–58. Denver, Colorado, United States: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/223904.223911.

Sandstrom, Pamela Effrein. 1994. “An Optimal Foraging Approach to Information Seeking and Use.” The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 64 (4): 414–49. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4308969.