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PROVO, Utah (AP) -- Searchers could find lost hikers faster with help from a computer program that brings a modern touch to algorithms used to find lost people since World War II.
The new software, under development at Brigham Young University, takes into account the spot where a hiker was last seen, the nature of the landscape and GPS track logs of others who have bushwhacked the same terrain. Those logs can show how terrain steers hikers one way or another.
A lot of search and rescue has a fairly mathematical component.
–Michael Goodrich
"A lot of search and rescue has a fairly mathematical component," said BYU professor Michael Goodrich.
Anyone who has ever traveled in the wilderness knows it can be disorienting, he said.
Goodrich and his students wrote about their efforts in an academic journal, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. A doctoral candidate, Lanny Lin, was in charge of developing the software.
The knowledge of local search and rescue experts also comes into play, Goodrich said.
The math professor said he hopes to offer his software to search-and-rescue teams in about a year.
It would be relatively easy to input data and take just a few minutes to crunch numbers and spit out results. One piece of critical data would be the paths that previously lost hikers took and later recounted.
Lin thinks another source will be more helpful: geocachers, who participate in high-tech treasure hunts using GPS to find hidden prizes. As they hunt, geocachers leave data trails of paths they take.
Utah County sheriff's Sgt. Tom Hodgson says that along with math and experience, psychology can help find somebody. His search and rescue unit enlists family members to fill out a "lost person questionnaire" that even asks about family fights.
"Sometimes it offends people, but you have to get their state of mind," Hodgson said.
BYU teams are also looking at uploading search information into unmanned aerial vehicles to automatically control their search grids. BYU has its own aerial vehicle but it's under tight restrictions from the Federal Aviation Administration.
"It turns out they don't like small unmanned aerial vehicles flying into Cessnas," Goodrich said.
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