Swarming, flocking, or herding is when a group of agents spontaneously begins to exhibit the same behavior. "Spontaneously" means that the behavior is not dictated by a leader or an external force.
Groups of birds, fish, cows, ants, bees, humans, and Borgs exhibit this kind of emergent behavior.
Swarming agents obey two rules:
Cohere: behave like your neighbors, but
Separate: avoid redundancy or duplication
The second rule distinguishes swarming from synchronizing.
SI is the area of Artificial Intelligence that designs systems whose intelligence emerges from swarming. See Models Library/Biology/Ants for a good example of how an ant colony spontaneously exploits food resources in order of distance (nearest first).
Each neuron in the brain has a firing frequency of about 60 Hz. When the brain is not focused, neurons are firing at different times, but when the brain focuses attention, large groups of neurons will start firing at the same time.
Boids! was an early computer model of how artificial birds (called "boids") could spontaneously form flocks. See Sample Models/Biology/Flocking for a NetLogo version of this model.
Swarm is a simplified version of the flocking model. Here's the update procedure:
to update-turtle
set current-neighbors other turtles
in-radius vision
if any? current-neighbors [
set nearest-neighbor min-one-of
current-neighbors [distance myself]
ifelse distance nearest-neighbor
< minimum-separation [
separate ; turn away from
nearest-neighbor
]
[
cohere ; turn toward average
heading of flock
]
]
fd speed
end
Basically, if a turtle is too close to another turtle, it turns away. Otherwise it turns toward the average heading of its neighbors.
Netwar refers to a type of warfare in which highly independent cells of combatants (terrorists, criminals, freedom fighters, etc.) spontaneously attack. The effect can be devastating in the same way that being attacked by a swarm of bees is far more serious that being stung by a single bee. Because the cells are independent, capturing or disabling one cell is useless just as killing one or two bees in a swarm is useless.
Group Think and conformity are examples of flocking behavior in human societies.
One example of this might be strong reciprocation. This is an elaboration of social evolution in which agents have a tendency to punish other agents they witness engaging in selfish behavior.