Month: September 2022

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE this weekend focuses on the murmurations of flocking birds, a conspicuous example of swarm intelligence, and how this work has inspired complex problem solutions, new and transformative theories of cellular swarm collaboration, and theories of brain organization. Analogies that creatively transcend scales and systems have been particularly fruitful. View in LinkedIn

VIDEO of the murmurations of starlings, a prime example of swarm intelligence. https://lnkd.in/eU7RFfB View in LinkedIn

VIDEO OF STARLING MURMURATIONS. https://lnkd.in/eKe8pBc View in LinkedIn

VIDEO OF FISH SCHOOLING, an analogy in a different system. https://lnkd.in/exP9Yi2 View in LinkedIn

SAFETY IN NUMBERS. "Swarming is a conspicuous behavioral trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms, and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators." https://lnkd.in/ernkfgF View in LinkedIn

SUPER-FLOCK. "Starling murmurations represent one of the most impressive examples of organization in the natural world, with flocks of up to 300,000 individuals or more able to coordinate themselves into a cohesive and highly coherent group." https://lnkd.in/ernkfgF View in LinkedIn

STARLING ANALOGY. "The closest statistical fit for this behavior comes from the physics of magnetism, and describes how the electron spins of particles align with their neighbors as metals become magnetized. In future research, Giardina’s team plans to study flocking in other organisms, such as local species of midges, which demonstrate other patterns of collective flight." https://lnkd.in/eJ7rdtJ View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE RULES? "The way in which the individual birds of the starling flock interact in order to maintain flock cohesion is governed by a remarkably simple set of rules. Indeed by monitoring the dynamics of flight of individuals closely...each individual starling birds’ flight trajectory is governed by its six-to-seven neighbours, irrespective of the distance to those neighbours." https://lnkd.in/e96DgxW View in LinkedIn

SIX NEIGHBORS. "Using a series of interlinked cameras, they measured murmurations in three dimensions, reconstructing individual starling movements from the videos...researchers showed that starlings do not respond to their neighbours based on their metric distance — as most current models assume — but rather on the topological distance, where each bird appears to interact with a fixed number of neighbours that is, on average, six to seven birds." https://lnkd.in/eDfErYk View in LinkedIn

LESS CLEAR. "Many current models involve the hypothesis that information coordinating motion is exchanged among neighbors. We argue that such local interactions alone are insufficient to explain the organization of large flocks of birds and that the mechanism for the exchange of long-range information necessary to control their density remains unknown." https://lnkd.in/ernkfgF View in LinkedIn