Foraging Among an Overabundance of Similar Variants.

Foraging among too many variants of the same artifact can be problematic when many of these variants are similar. This situation, which is largely overlooked in the literature, is commonplace in several types of creative tasks, one of which is exploratory programming. In this paper, we investigate how novice programmers forage through similar variants. Based on our results, we propose a refinement to Information Foraging Theory (IFT) to include constructs about variation foraging behavior, and propose refinements to computational models of IFT to better account for foraging among variants.