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Information about Boids

Boid also refers to some species of boa snakes.


Boids, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, is an artificial life program, simulating the flocking behaviour of birds.

As with most artificial life simulations, Boids is an example of emergent behaviour; that is, the complexity of Boids arises from the interaction of individual agents (the boids, in this case) adhering to a set of simple rules. The rules applied in the simplest Boids world are as follows:
  • separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
  • alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
  • cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates
More complex rules can be added, such as obstacle avoidance and goal seeking.

The movement of Boids can be characterized as either chaotic (splitting groups and wild behaviour) or orderly. Unexpected behaviours, such as splitting flocks and reuniting after avoiding obstacles, can be considered emergent.

The boids framework is often used in computer graphics, providing realistic-looking representations of flocks of birds and other creatures, such as schools of fish or herds of animals.

Boids work in a manner similar to cellular automata, since each boid "acts" autonomously and references a neighbourhood, as do cellular automata.

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Boidae
Gray, 1825

Genera
  • Acrantophis
  • ''Boa
  • Candoia
  • Corallus
  • Epicrates
  • Eryx
  • Eunectes
  • Gongylophis
  • Sanzinia


Boas
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Craig Reynolds (born March 15, 1953), is an artificial life and computer graphics expert, who created the Boids artificial life simulation in 1986. Reynolds worked on the film Tron (1982) as a scene programmer, and on Batman Returns
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1950s  1960s  1970s  - 1980s -  1990s  2000s  2010s
1983 1984 1985 - 1986 - 1987 1988 1989

Year 1986 (MCMLXXXVI
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Artificial Life, (commonly Alife or alife) is a field of study and associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry[1].
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Flocking is a common demonstration of emergence and emergent behavior, first simulated in 1986 by Craig Reynolds with his simulation program, Boids. It is a simulation of simple agents which are allowed to move, with basic rules governing their movement.
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Aves
Linnaeus, 1758

Orders

About two dozen - see section below

Birds (class Aves) are bipedal, warm-blooded, egg-laying vertebrate animals.
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emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Like intelligence in the field of AI, or agents in distributed artificial intelligence, emergence is central to the theory of complex systems and yet very
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A cellular automaton (plural: cellular automata) is a discrete model studied in computability theory, mathematics, and theoretical biology. It consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states.
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Herod_Archelaus


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