A team of Hungarian programmers struggle to teach autonomous drone copters to use alignment, attraction, and avoidance to simulate the flocking behavior of birds.
Can they ever be taught to behave as beautifully as these roosting starlings near Oxford, England?
My first university had a chapel bell tower where a flock similar to this one lived. Every evening they would create what looked like a tornado of birds slowly funnelling down into the tower to roost for the night. Every morning was a massive rush out to feed. As a very young Dark Lord, it was one of the coolest things I'd seen.
ReplyDeleteOtmoor looks like a terrible place for a twilight picnic.
ReplyDeleteThere is something mesmerizing about flocking. It's ironic to me that animators had such a hard time figuring it out at first, as it's ultimately a simple system (at least the parameters are). Making drones do it is really a hardware issue, it seems. What seems to be missing in that flock though, is a leader, or leaders. That will be tougher to emulate properly I imagine.
My husband and I once spent an hour or more near Uvalde watching an incredible number of bats come out of a cave at dusk, with a beautiful lightning storm in the distance. By the time it was getting fully dark, we were ready to leave, but the bats hadn't even slowed down.
ReplyDelete