Subjects were asked to perform a variety of tasks: form a circle, form a triangle, form a triangle with corner markers and form a square with corner markers. A corner is marked by a raised hand.
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Boids form a triangle and follow the mouse (not visible). Red boids are the corners and green boids are the edges. They tend to form equilateral triangles.
The following rules are used to create the triangle:
- A very weak desire to form a circle
- If there are less than 3 red boids, maybe become a red boid
- Equal forces are applied towards the 2 nearest red boid
- Follow the mouse
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Red boids are the corners and green boids are the edges. The number of sides that should be present is increased periodically.
The following rules are used to create the shapes:
- A very weak desire to form a circle
- If there are less red boids than current number of corners, maybe become a red boid
- Equal forces are applied towards the 2 nearest red boid
- Tend to the center of the screen (to keep it centered)
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Boids form a square, with red boids being the corners and green boids being the edges. Periodically new boids are added while other boids are removed. Notice when a boid is added, space is made for it and it enters the square easily. If an edge becomes too long, the side shifts some boids over to its neighbor edge. When an edge boid is removed, there is little effect to the structure and the rest of the square closes in the gap. However, the structure changes significantly when a red boid is removed since a new random boid becomes the 4th corner.
The following rules are used to create the square (same as triangle above, just 4 corners):
- A very weak desire to form a circle
- If there are less than 4 red boids then maybe become a red boid
- Equal forces are applied towards the 2 nearest red boid
- Tend to the center of the screen (to keep it centered)
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The rules here are the same as the Form Triangle demonstration, except that the boids have a limited sight range. This causes the boids to form local triangles.
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Boids in this demonstration form rows with the following two rules:
- Avoid closeness
- Have equal attraction to its two closest polar boids
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Boids in this demonstration self-organize into a circle. We varied the avoidance factor and the number of agents and ran several experiments to see what the radius would be. Our final goal was to create a mapping between the low-level parameters and the high-level property of radius.
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Boids in this demonstration flock towards a goal (red dot). We record the average density on the way to the goal.
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Boids moving around in a 3dimensional environment. Bigger boids are closer to the screen than smaller boids. Boids are dynamically color coded based on their flock.
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I used a simple randomized hill climbing algorithm on the parameters of a boid flock to have them converge towards a desired density. In this demonstration, the boids go from high-density to low-density.
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This is the same as the triangle swarm, except that it is in 3D, with four corners. Also, there is no usage of the form circle rule (which makes it a bit bouncy).
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