Intricate dynamics of a deterministic walk confined in a strip

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a deterministic walk confined in a narrow two-dimensional space randomly filled with point-like targets. At each step, the walker visits the nearest target not previously visited. Complex dynamics is observed at some intermediate values of the domain width, when, while drifting, the walk performs long intermittent backward excursions. As the width is increased, evidence of a transition from ballistic motion to a weakly non-ergodic regime is shown, characterized by sudden inversions of the drift velocity with a probability slowly decaying with time, as $1/t$ at leading order. Excursion durations, first-passage times and the dynamics of unvisited targets follow power-law distributions. For parameter values below this scaling regime, precursory patterns in the form of "wild" outliers are observed, in close relation with the presence of log-oscillations in the probability distributions. We discuss the connections between this model and several evolving biological systems.