The Paradox of Doing It Wrong in Order to Do It Right

Overview

In many cases of Land Search and Rescue the search for individuals that are believed to be unconscious or in need of medical attention are time critical. However, due to the shortage of resources, the search methods employed were not always adequate to find the target in the fastest time. I combined each ‘losing search game’ into a strategy to minimize the search time and minimize the time. My hypothesis is if I create a land search and rescue simulation in a computer and place a stationary target and a randomly moving target in a random location, I will be able to find a combination of lower and higher success probability techniques to find the search target in the minimum amount of time due to the fact that the combination of faster-lower success techniques and slower-higher success techniques will minimize the search time as shown over at least 50,000 trials. My experiment created an Excel spreadsheet to execute trials of each type of search for stationary and moving targets. Based on my results for the stationary target, the best search would be to choose between the traditional Careful Search, AAABB Search, or the AABBB Search. Also based on my results for the moving target, the best search is clearly the AAABBB Search. Overall, when little to no information is available prior to the search, it is best to apply the AAABBB Search.

Competition history

• ISEF 2017 Mathematics · Entry MATH011

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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