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From: mccool@dgp.toronto.edu (Michael McCool)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Bird flight as an emergent property
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.100748.2501@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 90 14:07:48 GMT
References: <1990Oct23.170118.27104@ecn.purdue.edu> <1990Oct24.114805.3306@idayton.field.intel.com>
Lines: 30

jimf@idayton.field.intel.com (Jim Fister) writes:

>muttiah@stable.ecn.purdue.edu (Ranjan S Muttiah) writes:
>>	It seems that some flock of birds fly in random formation and
>>then suddenly converge together, and then continue almost in random flight
>>and then again converge etc. [stuff deleted 'cause of bandwitdh]
>>It is really an interesting question of whether
>>birds  (in flight) show intelligent behaviour or are just purely constrained
>>by the physical laws of flight (wind streams etc).

>>Any comments ?

You might want to check out the work done in graphics on the animation
of flocks, herd, schools (of fish), and other collective motion.  I don't
have any references handy, but you can ask a friendly neighbourhood graphics
type or look through the last few years of Computer Graphics (the proceedings
of the SIGGRAPH conference published in journal form).  There is also an
nice animation, whose name escapes me (BOY, I'm a LOT of help, aren't I?) which
animated fish & birds.

I seem to recall windstream has nothing to do with it; the collective behaviour
is a result of the birds desire to "remain together" balanced against a desire 
to avoid collision with each other and objects.  And of course, at least in the
case of birds, a minimum speed may be necessary to remain airborne (ignoring
hovering and soaring).  Collective "goal-directed"
behaviour, i.e. following a general path or going towards a point (tropism)
is also a factor.

Anyhow, good luck.
Michael McCool@dgp.toronto.edu