Germs Help Find Missing Senator!
The "random walk" approach to exploring new places is my favorite. Take the first time I visited Fairbanks, for instance. The method's easy...drive one direction, turn when the urge hits you, drive a bit more, change direction, and so on. Engineers use this general approach (semi-random initial placement) when finding local or global solutions in a vector field. The putting green is a great place to find individuals using random walk towards a defined goal.
Wiki Link: Random Walk and Random Walk Hypothesis
Wiki Link: Vector Field and Putting Green
Many bacteria take this mindless approach. They go about their exploration in a similar way as I do. Spin propeller-like hair, move forward towards good (interesting things)...reverse propeller and move backwards away from bad things. Bacterial chemotaxis involves one of the only biologically-formed rotating structures by the way.
Wiki Link: Bacterial Locomotion
So, I've found coincidentally that Fairbanks, Alaska was named after a Republican Senator from Indiana and Vice President of the United States under Theodore Roosevelt.
Wiki Link: Fairbanks, AK
Wiki Link: Charles W. Fairbanks
Afterthought: A quote from E.L Doctorow's award-winning novel Ragtime (1975), which involves Charles W. Fairbanks as a minor character follows. This quote concerns the power of the gifted to retain their human importance despite the commonly-held perception that technology forms barriers to individualism:
Why do you suppose an idea which had currency in every age and civilization of mankind disappears in modern times? Because only in the age of science have these men and their wisdom dropped from view. I'll tell you why: The rise of mechanistic science, of Newton and Descartes, was a great conspiracy, a great devilish conspiracy to destroy our apprehension of reality and our awareness of the transcendentally gifted among us. But they are with us today nevertheless. They are with us in every age. They come back, you see? They come back!
Wiki Link: E. L Doctorow (author)
Wiki Link: Ragtime (novel)
