Sudeep Pillai

Boids: Modeling and understanding emergent behavior

Introduction
Flocking of birds has always been a spectacle to all, especially to ornithologists. It has been one of the
most intriguing, yet natural behaviors that I’ve ever encountered and it can be hard to explain it just from
its movement. Its magnificence lies in its fluidic motion, but its complexity is noticed in its synchronized
behavior. Each discrete bird behaves based on its local perception; however, it is amazing how their
interactions produce an overall fluid-like unified motion. What’s more interesting is that such behaviors
occur even when the bird does not have a global perspective of its goal or movement. Such splendors in
life give rise to several questions in behavioral psychology, distributed behavior control and many other
fields including complexity.

In this paper, I would like to address the notion of ‘emergence’ that is pertinent to flocking. Using this
generalized theory, I have attempted to understand the behavior of birds in flocks and their reason to
flock. This in turn allowed me to simulate a rather simple yet reasonably realistic model of how birds
flock. Implementing such a simulation framework has also compelled me to look into different algorithms
that have already been implemented and those that I’ve learnt from this class.

Motivation
Birds, in general, have always puzzled me. I’m amazed by how birds can so intelligibly interact with each
other to strategize an efficient flying formation that benefits the flock as a whole. Their intricate
maneuverability and their spectacular flocking behavior can be quite startling to many people when they
are used to seeing the common phenomenon of birds hitting windows. Nevertheless, if birds have
‘emerged’ over the past years to fabricate an ingenious flying strategy, then how did they possibly do this
with a low level of intelligence? My interest in this topic gives me a better understanding of distributed
behavior models and allows me to pursue my career in autonomous vehicles and intelligent highway
traffic where this idea may be relevant.

The ‘Science’ of Flocking

Even though several scientists have tried to reason the need to flock, it still remains uncertain why most
birds flock. One reason towards flocking pertains to the need of each individual bird to reduce the drag
force that it experiences compared to if it were flying alone. During flight, vortices generated at the
wingtips of each bird produce an upwash that can be beneficial to a second wing flying behind and
slightly above the first. A bird flying in this upwash region gains free lift allowing it to reduce its angle of
attack, thereby decreasing the drag induced during forward thrust. The birds that flanks a bird ahead of it
gains an advantage as it needs lesser energy to fly, allowing it to fly for a longer distance. A common
misunderstanding is that the bird that leads the flock is at most disadvantage. This is not true since the
reduced downwash that is dissipated by the two birds that flank it helps reduce the induced drag that it
experiences. Thus putting both interactions into perspective, birds towards the middle gain considerable
overall advantage over the other birds in the flock. The idea that a “V formation” is produced from such
interactions is quite acceptable as each bird gains benefit from one another thereby reducing the overall
expenditure in energy.

This interaction brings another problem into play that the flock tackles ever so beautifully. Since the bird
leading the flock tires the quickest, they drop out of the lead position and fall further back into one of the
formation lines. Another bird from further back rapidly takes charge and fills in the position as the lead.
This sense of responsibility and teamwork is essential to an efficient flock and captures the essence of
flocking mentality towards an ‘optimum energy solution’ i.e. the classic “flying V” formation for the
whole flock. This behavior dictates striking similarity to Nash’s equilibrium where an ‘optimum solution’
is that which benefits both the individual and the group as a whole.

Other reasons for flocking include improved communication amongst other birds, improved foraging,
increased protection from predators and better social and mating activities.

Flocking: A truly evocative example of emergence

A fluid-like unified motion of several discrete birds that act based on their corresponding local perception
is intriguing to many in the fields of behavioral psychology, distributed behavioral modeling etc. What’s
even more interesting is that such global maneuvers benefit not only the individual, but the flock as a
whole. Such motivation towards a more ‘optimum solution’ i.e. flying formation is also critical to
understanding their behavior particularly pertaining to emergence. A similarity that arises with the
comparison of flocks with the Prisoner’s dilemma is also interesting to comment on. If the birds chose to
‘betray’ other flocks by moving towards the middle of the flock, they would be hurting other birds and in
turn hurting themselves. The birds however, for some reason that is unknown, keep order and cooperate
with each other to produce an emergent behavior that is far more intelligent than any single bird.

Dilemma in Modeling
In order to model flocking, I see two distinct questions at hand. Do we model how the birds ‘emerged’
into flocks or do we analyze how the birds interact in a flock to produce a realistic model? Each of these
paths has completely different methodologies that that may be crucial at understanding the deep meaning
of emergence at the flocking level. Even though the latter question is relatively more trivial than the
former, it paves a path for a deeper understanding of modeling emergence in flocking behavior and thus I
chose to take on this path.

Modeling Boids
Modeling boids (simulated flocks) can be as trivial as defining a few governing rules that each bird must
follow, and see how they interact with several of their kind to produce a unified distributed behavior. The
three governing rules of separation, adhesion and cohesion, as described by Craig Reynolds in his paper
[1], only take into account certain aspects of the physical world. However, to make boids as realistic as
possible, there can be several modifications and additions to this framework. Some of the modifications
that have been implemented include collision avoidance, velocity matching and flock centering in their
decreasing order of precedence. Furthermore, several other desired features such as tendency towards a
goal, limiting flock speed, workspace bounds, boid neighborhood, perching and obstacle avoidance can
be implemented rather easily to generate more life-like behavior. In my drive towards simulating a life-
like model to predict flock behavior, I have been successful in implementing the first three additions. A
rigorous pseudo code explaining the algorithm I implemented and that plan to implement is shown in
Appendix A.

Further additions may require a more involved algorithm to accomplish certain desired tasks. Flock
learning, where the birds vary the influence of each rule over the course of the simulation can produce
unanticipated results that may be beneficial in some way or the other. Some of these unanticipated results
such as anti-flocking result from negating the rule of flock centering in turn bring us to another critical
issue. Can we possibly have different permutations of such different behaviors with different ‘influence’
terms? Questions such as these are yet to be explained and I hope to continue working on them given that
I finally built a framework for modeling boids.

Future Work

As was evident from the video of my simulation, there exists a fluidic flow even with a few simple rules
that govern each of the boids. Given the current modeling framework, it is also possible to optimize these
behaviors to produce better results catering to a particular need. A typical implementation is related to
foraging for food based on the Ant Colony Optimization [2] techniques (ACO) that have been modeled
after ant behavior. Another technique that is closely related to ACO is the Particle Swarm Optimization
(PSO) that share similar evolutionary computation techniques with that of GAs. The PSO algorithm looks
for a single solution i.e. ‘a single bird’ that is closest to the goal and optimizes the solution by requesting
the bird to lead the flock. The fitness function that each bird has is re-evaluated at each time step and
optimized to produce best results.

Another possible solution to realistically modeling of flocks could involve modeling a 3D perspective
view of each boid and calculating its effects due to other boids and physics. This method, apart from
being relatively complex, can be fairly expensive to compute. However, an alternative to this solution that
could be more feasible involves projecting each of the effects of the boid onto a plane that is normal to
the heading vector of each boid. This relatively a non-trivial but feasible method that could take into
account of aerodynamics and flocking behavior to predict the formations that we see often in real life.

Conclusions
Most of the existing models and techniques that have been developed are based on our perception of how
flocks behave and interact, while some others based on optimizing certain tasks such as food foraging.
However, there has not been one model that reasonably predicts the realistic behaviors of birds in flocks.
Some of the questions and concerns I’ve put forward may be never dealt with, but it doesn’t stop us from
asking ourselves the question, ‘Have flocks emerged completely?’ If not, then, is the “flying V”
formation a transitional phase in emergence that took ever so long to perfect that it may take even longer
to come up with a more optimum formation?

The transitional phase in the emergence of a flock can also be related to Conway’s glider where the
transition function described produces a sequence of changes in pattern over successive time-steps.
Similar to Conway’s glider, in the case of boids or flocks, the possibility of a spatially coherent pattern
cannot be easily determined due to its vast number of non-linear interactions. The possibilities are
endless, and we model based on what we perceive. It requires a combination of experiment, bird-
watching in this case, and theory to discover and explain regularities. This implies that birds may have
evolved and ‘emerged’ over time, they may truly have developed an emergent behavior of higher order
intelligence; but can they ‘emerge’ further to produce even higher orders of intelligence given the endless
possibilities.
References

[1] Reynolds, C. W., “Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model” at
SIGGRAPH ‘87

[2] Kennedy, J. and Eberhart,R.C, “Swarm Intelligence”, Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 1994