Noun

(en noun)

The person, place or thing from which something (information, goods, etc.) comes or is acquired.

* {{quote-book, year=2006, author=(Edwin Black)

, title=Internal Combustion, chapter=2 citation , passage=More than a mere source of Promethean sustenance to thwart the cold and cook one's meat, wood was quite simply mankind's first industrial and manufacturing fuel.}}

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-06, volume=408, issue=8843, page=68, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= The rise of smart beta , passage=Investors face a quandary. Cash offers a return of virtually zero in many developed countries; government-bond yields may have risen in recent weeks but they are still unattractive. Equities have suffered two big bear markets since 2000 and are wobbling again. It is hardly surprising that pension funds, insurers and endowments are searching for new sources of return.}}

Spring; fountainhead; wellhead; any collection of water on or under the surface of the ground in which a stream originates.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-16, author= John Vidal

, volume=189, issue=10, page=8, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Dams endanger ecology of Himalayas , passage=Most of the Himalayan rivers have been relatively untouched by dams near their sources . Now the two great Asian powers, India and China, are rushing to harness them as they cut through some of the world's deepest valleys.}}

A reporter's informant.

(computing) Source code.

(electronics) The name of one terminal of a field effect transistor (FET).

Noun

(-)

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 ''[[w:Nature (journal), Nature] , volume 445, pages 406–409 (2007 January 25)

*2008 , Caihua Xiong, Honghai Liu, Yongan Huang, Youlun Xiong (editors), Intelligent Robotics and Applications: First International Conference ICIRA 2008 , page 1206:

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.

* 2009 , M.G. Velard et al., "Mathematical Approach to Sensory Motor Control and Memory", Chapter 5 of Paola Arena and Luca Patanè (editors), Spatial Temporal Patterns for Action-Oriented Perception in Roving Robots , Springer, ISBN 9783540884637, page 260:

*: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.

*2009 , Huan Liu, John Salerno, Michael Young, Social Computing and Behavioral Modeling , page 94:

*:In a recent paper, Vergassola et al. demonstrated that infotaxis', which is motion based on expected information gain, can be a more effective search strategy when the source signal is weak than conventional methods such as moving along the gradient of a chemical concentration [2]. The ' infotaxis algorithm combines the two competing goals of exploration of possible search moves and exploitation of received signals to guide the searcher in the direction with the highest probability of finding the source [3].

*2010', Eduardo Martin Moraud and Dominique Martinez, "Effectiveness and Robustness of Robot '''Infotaxis for Searching in Dilute Conditions", in ''Frontiers in Neurorobotics , 4:1