Minimizing the profligacy of searches with reset.

Abstract

We introduce the profligacy of a search process as a competition between its expected cost and the probability of finding the target. The arbiter of the competition is a parameter λ that represents how much a searcher invests into increasing the chance of success. Minimizing the profligacy with respect to the search strategy specifies the optimal search. We show that in the case of diffusion with stochastic resetting, the amount of resetting in the optimal strategy has a highly nontrivial dependence on model parameters resulting in classical continuous transitions, discontinuous transitions and tricritical points, as well as nonstandard discontinuous transitions exhibiting reentrant behavior and overhangs.