The Santa Fe Institute is an independent institution for theoretical research located in New Mexico, dedicated to the study of complex systems.

Introduction

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, including physicists Murray Gell-Mann and David Pines.

The institute has made fundamental contribution to the study of chaos theory, genetic algorithms, the complexity economics school of thought, complex networks, and systems biology.

Research

At the SFI, I work with my mentor Sidney Redner on the study of first-passage processes. In particular, we study a special kind of first-passage process called the starving random walk. The motivation for this is that,animals lacking complete knowledge of their surroundings wander the land searching and competing for food. This can be modeled by a starving random walk, in which a unit of food is initially placed on each node of a lattice or a graph, and a diffusing particle (a “forager”) wanders according to an unbiased random walk, and depletes the foods upon encounter. If the forager wanders for too long without encountering food, it dies. The case for one forager on square hyperlattices is pretty well-studied. Therefore, we will study properties of the SRW of multiple foragers on a 1D/2D lattice, a complete graph, and a Bethe lattice.