Lévy flights

How do we look? How exactly is it that we conduct our quests? Is it just a series of random occurrences the ones which lead us to the grand discoveries, those which rattle us to the core and shape our existence? Or is it something more, something more meaningful programmed deep inside, ready to astonish us at every unexpected curve? This seemingly simple question has resulted in an enormous effort of scientific research in recent decades. From the enigmatic flight of the Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans) to the most basic constituents of our everyday searches, all of these apparently insignificant manifestations are part of the same behavior, a random pattern discovered by a very bright french mathematician called Paul Pierre Lévy, conveniently baptised as "Lévy flights".

And what did this very bright french mathematican said? He said that everytime we set sail for a new skyline, after a certain number of steps, the distance from the origin of the random walk tends to a stable distribution. Short movements which precede long displacements. Basically, that no matter how much we try to hide it, we lose ourselves within the boundaries of the unknown-known.

Whether an animal foraging, a rescue team trying to locate a plane that has crashed in the middle of the ocean or an algorithm searching for information on a database, all of these cases require an optimal strategy to efficiently locate a target. So do we. Sometimes we scramble through our surroundings and find a restaurant that we like. We return. We take friends. We throw parties. It becomes ours. Until one day we no longer like it as much as we used to. Then we change restaurant and begin the process again.

We go out, we fall in love, we roam and collapse, we get up and go back to the hunt for beauty, we don't give up, we never give up. We break hearts, we let people down. We succumb to our doubts. We tear ourselves apart. We hit the bottom and escape. We move, we search, we look-look-look until we think we may have exhausted all stocks. Then we go out again to a lovely, new, wild trip. To catch that gleaming, never-ending promise that we're not supposed to obtain. And that, my boy, is human nature.

Fly, Felix, Fly.