Flocking in

Flocking in

climate was rare heavy rainfall in western Queensland. And a result has been enormous flocks of the popular pet bird, budgerigars. The birds have had a breeding boom as a result of the grasses that have seeded after the rains. “I have been here since 1983 and never seen anything like it, Ann Britton, a resident of Boulia, told Queensland’s Courier and Mail. “My father, who has travelled extensi...

Flocking Behavior

Flocking is the phenomenon in which self-propelled individuals, using only limited environmental information and simple rules, organize into an ordered motion. This ordering even occurs at two dimensions where ordering is not possible equilibrium systems. This paper will explain the biological and physical motivation for studying flocking, and the computational, theoretical, and experimental ef...

Flocking in noisy environments

The problem of reaching a consensus in a group of autonomous agents has been the object of study in a number of situations ranging from linguistics [11, 18, 20] to distributed computing [25, 26] and from physics [27] to animal behavior [6, 13, 23, 24]. Research on the latter attempts to explain, by appropriately modeling it, the observed behavior of a group of animals, say a flock of birds, who...

Parallel Bird Flocking Simulation

Flocking ferromagnetic colloids

Assemblages of microscopic colloidal particles exhibit fascinating collective motion when energized by electric or magnetic fields. The behaviors range from coherent vortical motion to phase separation and dynamic self-assembly. Although colloidal systems are relatively simple, understanding their collective response, especially under out-of-equilibrium conditions, remains elusive. We report on...