Flocking behaviour seen in nature can be captured by the Boids algorithm, an artificial life construct developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. Here, we demonstrate that the phenomenon of flocking can be regarded as emergent behaviour in a complex system which can be described by a network automaton: Each individual (or Boid) is connected to other individuals present in their visual range. This network influences the movement and location of each individual, which in turn influences the network, and so on.
To construct the network automaton, we define both an activity_rule and a topology_rule. The topology_rule simply
determines the distance between each individual, and connects them if they are within visual range. The activity_rule
is applied to each individual during a timestep: it obtains the state of each neighbour (i.e. their position and
velocity) in the visual range, and updates the individual's position and velocity accordingly.
Below are plots resulting from a simulation with 10 Boids:
The top plot illustrates how the individuals' states (positions and velocities) are changing with time. The bottom plot depicts the corresponding network as it changes with time.
The full source code for this example can be found here.
For more information, please refer to the following resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids
https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/labs/s2021/Boids/Boids.html
http://rits.github-pages.ucl.ac.uk/doctoral-programming-intro/02-novice/100Boids.html
Reynolds, C. W. (1987, August). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. In Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques (pp. 25-34).