Murmur

September 17, 2009 9:59 AM

Murmur. Photographs of flocking birds by Richard Barnes.
Boids. A program by Craig Reynolds modeling emergent behavior.
Swarm. A platform and wiki for agent-based modelers.
posted by OmieWise (14 comments total)

Flipping You The Boid. An interactive flash program modeling boids.

A [ Radiohead / JavaScript / Boids / Canvas / SM2 ] mashup. Picture drawn by boids moving to music.
posted by trueluk at 10:07 AM on September 17, 2009

Thought-provoking. Thanks, Omie.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 10:08 AM on September 17, 2009

Anybody interested in emergent behavior should also check out Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg. Back in print after several years of being difficult to find. There are some simulators linked from Wikipedia.
posted by ecurtz at 10:28 AM on September 17, 2009

The Boids link starts Java, if that kills anyone else's systems.
posted by smackfu at 10:35 AM on September 17, 2009

I like flocking birds.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 10:48 AM on September 17, 2009

One can also check out using Processing for Simulation and Artificial Life, including this sweet example: Swarm Box 3.
posted by wfitzgerald at 11:17 AM on September 17, 2009

Reynolds' biods are a classic work in the field of computer animation. His SIGGRAPH '87 paper is a great read. Nice to see this work is not forgotten.
posted by diekhans at 11:18 AM on September 17, 2009

I was expecting boids and was curious what someone would want to model about them emerging from hiding places. The java critters were quite a surprise.
posted by notashroom at 11:59 AM on September 17, 2009

Turbine
posted by brundlefly at 12:02 PM on September 17, 2009

Flocking awesome.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 3:57 PM on September 17, 2009

I'd just like to point out Swarm was written by Metafilter's own nelson and a bunch of other, much smarter people. There's a lot better, more recent agent based simulation toolkits out there these days. Although Swarm is interesting as a historical footnote for being one of the very few non-NeXT based Objective C products out there.

I've still never seen something as cool as Karl Sims' locomotion evolution experiments. That work is 15 years old now; why don't we have videogames doing this in realtime?
posted by Nelson at 4:46 PM on September 17, 2009 [2 favorites]

The Breve simulation environment has some nice flocking variations, a Brietenburg machine you can mess around with, and some Karl Sim-ish stuff as well. Also, I misread the first link as "Photographs of fucking birds by Richard Barnes."
posted by gamera at 7:40 PM on September 17, 2009

a lot better, more recent agent based simulation toolkits

Examples?
posted by lathrop at 8:12 PM on September 17, 2009

I have wanted for some time to apply Boids to the classroom. You know, give a few simple procedures to students and watch the cognitive flocking emerge. Still haven't quite figured it out, though.
posted by argybarg at 6:38 AM on September 19, 2009