Flocking is a common demonstration of emergence and emergent behaviour, invented in 1987 by Craig Reynolds with his simulation program, Boids. It is a simulation of simple agents which are allowed to move, with basic rules governing their movement. The result is alike to a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a swarm of insects. A termite cathedral mound produced by a termite colony: a classic example of emergence. ... Emergence is the process of deriving some new and coherent structures, patterns and properties in a complex system. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Craig Reynolds, an A-life and computer graphics expert, created the Boids artificial life simulation in 1986. ... Boids, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, is an artificial life program, simulating the flocking behaviour of birds. ... Categories: Animal stubs | Animal behaviour | Social psychology ... Orders Many - see section below. ... Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus: one of the most abundant species of fish in the world. ... School of juvenile herring - many fish have the opercula wide open for ram feeding and you can see the red gills The term swarm (schooling or swarming) is applied to fish, birds and insects and describes a behavior of an aggregation (school) of animals of similar size and body orientation... Classes & Orders See taxonomy Insects are invertebrate animals of the Class Insecta, the largest and (on land) most widely-distributed taxon within the phylum Arthropoda. ...

Basic flocking is controlled by three simple rules:

1. Separation - avoid crowding neighbours
2. Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbours
3. Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbours

With these three simple rules, the flock moves in an extremely realistic way, creating complex motion and interaction that would be extremely hard to create otherwise.

Flocking is a common technology in screensavers, and has found its use in animation. Flocking has been used in many films to generate crowds which move more realistically. Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992) featured flocking penguins, and Disney's The Lion King (1994) included a wildebeest stampede. A screensaver is a computer program originally designed to conserve the image quality of computer displays by blanking the screen or filling them with moving images or patterns when the computers are not in use. ... Tim Burton Timothy William Burton (born August 25, 1958) is an American film director, poet and designer known for his off-beat and quirky style. ... Batman Returns is both the second Tim Burton Batman movie and the second Batman film starring Michael Keaton as the title character. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... Walt Disney Pictures is an American movie studio, with off-shoot studios in Japan and other sites in the United States. ... For the theatrical musical, see The Lion King (musical). ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ... Species Connochaetes taurinus Connochaetes gnou Connochaetes taurinus cooksoni Connochaetes taurinus albojubatus Connochaetes taurinus johnstoni The wildebeest, also called gnu (pronounced or ), is a large hooved (ungulate) mammal of the genus Connochaetes, which includes two species, both native to Africa: the Black Wildebeest (), and the Blue & White-bearded Wildebeest or Blue... A stampede is an act of mass impulse among herd animals or a crowd of people in which the herd (or crowd) collectively begins running with no clear direction or purpose. ...

Lee Spector, Jon Klein, Chris Perry and Mark Feinstein studied the emergence of collective behavior in evolutionary computation systems. In their paper Emergence of Collective Behavior in Evolving Populations of Flying Agents they describe such systems in detail.

External links

• Craig Reynolds' Boids page
• NetLogo, a free software for multi-agent modeling, simulation, and the like, including a flocking simulation.
• VisualBots - Freeware multi-agent simulator in Microsoft Excel - Visual Basic syntax