Murmurations - GavWood/DOGE-Game-Engine GitHub Wiki
What are murmurations?
Murmurations are the patterns made when hundreds of thousands of starlings come together in huge flying masses. The birds turn the sky black as they follow their airborne neighbours in this incredible wildlife spectacle.
These unique formations happen during autumn and the winter months and can be seen over piers, nature reserves and over city skylines.
Flocking simulation
Flocking behaviour was first simulated on computers by Craig Reynolds in 1986. You can read about his work here: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids.
I am interested in recreating this phenomena and you can see my attempts on [YouTube].(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQhEGPrINJo).
Each of the birds pictured in the video is following a set of rules that Reynolds suggested - those of cohesion, alignment, and separation.
- Cohesion - steer to move toward the average position of local neighbours
- Alignment - steer towards the average heading of local neighbours
- Separation - steer to avoid crowding local neighbours
Why would we be interesting in simulating them?
Aside from being fun - understanding the maths that can represent nature can help us explore new algorithms for AI in which can be used in robotics to solve real problems.
This GitHub aims to provide a useful starting point to lean about these simulations and experiment with the underlying maths. The code was released in response to being continually contacted for the source code used in these two YouTube videos.
