infotaxis

noun

1. (uncountable)Any searching strategy in which there is sparse information, especially a strategy used by biological organisms to zigzag towards the source of an odour based on sporadic clues.

   “2006–7, Massimo Vergassola et al., "‘Infotaxis’ as a strategy for searching without gradients", in Nature, volume 445, pages 406–409 (2007 January 25)”

   “Some literatures investigated the odor source localization by robots mimicking biologic behaviors, such as chemotaxis [1] and anemotaxis [2], or custom algorithms like fluxotaxis [3] and infotaxis [4]. The multi-robot system has more advantages than single robot in odor source localization. First, the expected search time can be decreased. Second, the multi-robot system does not easily fall into local maxima.”

   “In the framework of the so-called infotaxis algorithm any search process can be thought of as acquisition of information on source location. Thus information plays a role similar to concentration in chemotaxis. Then the infotaxis strategy locally maximizes the expected rate of information gain.”