Flocking is the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities and is a collective animal behavior exhibited by many living beings such as birds, fish, bacteria, and insects. It is considered an emergent behavior arising from simple rules that are followed by individuals and does not involve any central coordination. As a common demonstration of emergence and emergent behavior, it was first simulated on a computer in 1986 by Craig Reynolds with his simulation program, Boids. This program simulates simple agents (boids) that are allowed to move according to a set of basic rules. The result is akin to a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a swarm of insects.The simplest mathematical models of animal aggregations generally instruct the individual animals to follow three rules:
1. Separation - avoid crowding neighbours (short range repulsion)2. Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbours
3. Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbours (long range attraction)
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.
Collective Animal Behavior describes the coordinated behavior of large groups of similar animals and the emergent properties of these groups. Facets of this topic include the costs and benefits of group membership, the transfer of information across the group, the group decision-making process, and group locomotion and synchronization. Studying the principles of collective animal behavior has relevance to human engineering problems through the philosophy of biomimetics. For instance, determining the rules by which an individual animal navigates relative to its neighbors in a group can lead to advances in the deployment and control of groups of swimming or flying micro-robots such as UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles).
(From Wikipedia)
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