The swarm you can see on Transients.co is a murmuration, an impressive simulation by Ben, which I am allowed to use for this site.
He sums up the swarm beautifully with “The birds are flying now. And in doing so, they show how simple rules and individual actors can result in coordinated movement. Just like in organizations. Only with fewer meetings and more elegance.”
Thank you, Ben.
Some key points from the (technical) background can be found below:
- It is “a collectively acting swarm of 4096 digital birds that respond to thermal updrafts, tilt in curves, and have a 270-degree field of view.”
- “Each bird was also given an individual maximum speed, fuzzy between 75% and 150% of a base speed.”
- “Red birds are the strategic leaders; they are closest to the target. They stay close to the center of gravity and set the main direction. Orange birds are strategic consultants; they fly at a medium distance and have stable flight behavior. They have stable, moderate movements and help with coordination. Pink birds are Change Champions; the most active, with high speed and strong altitude variations. They exhibit particularly dynamic, active movements. These roles are recalculated every 20 frames. It is very exciting to observe that leadership emerges from behavior, not from fixed hierarchies. Just like in real organizations! The metaphor was not planned and arose from the system itself.”
- There are “about 49 million calculations per second. 4096 birds, each checking up to 16 neighbors, following three flocking rules, reacting to wind and thermal updrafts, and having character. All 60 times per second. All in parallel on the GPU.”
Ben has also created the Murmuration as an app, which is available for download at Murmuration App for MacOS.