Does this generalization to flocking birds mean that we can go beyond the forces and simulate any large number of 'objects' that can affect each other's movement? Another example I can think of is ants. Does this mean we can "model" the pheromone transfer between ants to simulate the behavior of the ant colony?
ninjab3381
I'm just curious how we can approximate the proximity of birds coming together as forces? Would this be similar to attractive forces like charges in E&M?
stephanie-fu
@yykkcc It seems like we can use this framework of "defining behavior of each object at each timestep conditioned on other factors" to go beyond forces and simulate any large number of objects interacting. So I would guess that we could model pheromone transfer as long as we have a model of how a molecule behaves around other molecules and ants.
Rohan1215
We decided to do our final project on this pattern in nature and learned that there is an algorithm called Boids that simulates this behavior by treating each bird (boid) as a point mass and using three types of forces to control them: cohesion, separation, and alignment. Cohesion is the force that pushes each bird towards the average location of all of the birds. Alignment is the force that pushes each bird in the average direction of all of the birds' velocities. Lastly, separation is the force that repels two birds that are too close to one another and about to collide.
eugenek07
Utilizing particles and masses and springs to calculate forces of nature has a lot of different use cases in research. I can think of a number of games where animal behavior is set based on a number of behavioral criteria and the system is simply run. It's cool to see how a few factors can have large effects on behavior of animals in simulations.
Does this generalization to flocking birds mean that we can go beyond the forces and simulate any large number of 'objects' that can affect each other's movement? Another example I can think of is ants. Does this mean we can "model" the pheromone transfer between ants to simulate the behavior of the ant colony?
I'm just curious how we can approximate the proximity of birds coming together as forces? Would this be similar to attractive forces like charges in E&M?
@yykkcc It seems like we can use this framework of "defining behavior of each object at each timestep conditioned on other factors" to go beyond forces and simulate any large number of objects interacting. So I would guess that we could model pheromone transfer as long as we have a model of how a molecule behaves around other molecules and ants.
We decided to do our final project on this pattern in nature and learned that there is an algorithm called Boids that simulates this behavior by treating each bird (boid) as a point mass and using three types of forces to control them: cohesion, separation, and alignment. Cohesion is the force that pushes each bird towards the average location of all of the birds. Alignment is the force that pushes each bird in the average direction of all of the birds' velocities. Lastly, separation is the force that repels two birds that are too close to one another and about to collide.
Utilizing particles and masses and springs to calculate forces of nature has a lot of different use cases in research. I can think of a number of games where animal behavior is set based on a number of behavioral criteria and the system is simply run. It's cool to see how a few factors can have large effects on behavior of animals in simulations.