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Flocking, Swarming, and Communicating

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The Essential Tension

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

Abstract

AS WE have seen, Durkheim and others attempted to explain of how groups of humans come together as a collective. One of the most beautiful innovations of twentieth century physics was the ability to analyze such behavior with statistical methods and computational models. This has enabled researchers to quantify the specific aspects of a group of individuals that change as the individuals coalesce into a crowd. For the first time, a quantitative step could be taken toward answering the question when does a group become a separate individual in its own right?

Lordy, I hope there are tapes.

James Comey

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rather ruefully, Reynolds pointed out that the computer scientist is not so lucky: computational modeling of flock behavior does indeed get significantly more difficult as the flock size is increased.

  2. 2.

    See Brush (1967) for a history of the early days of this field and the development of the iconic Ising model.

  3. 3.

    Vicsek et al. appear not to have been aware of the boids model at the time they submitted their 1995 paper. Toner and Tu (1995) noted that D. Rokhsar alerted them to Reynolds’s work. Following their citation, nearly all statistical physics studies of flocking cited Reynolds’s boids model as an important precursor.

  4. 4.

    Giardina (2008) provides an excellent review summarizing the results of these and many other contributions to the field.

  5. 5.

    Collective inhibition of locomotion is a process whereby cells, at least in vitro, change their direction of motion upon contact. It has some commonalities with the nematic collisions observed between microtubules (see below), and is impaired in malignant cells. See Mayor and Carmona-Fontaine (2010) for an overview and evidence for the phenomenon in vivo.

  6. 6.

    In a nematic phase, typically observed in systems such as liquid crystals, the constituents align parallel to each other, but do not form ordered layers. In bacteria, this has been referred to as a “bio-nematic” phase.

  7. 7.

    This difference in interaction type does not prevent the collective behavior of the actin filaments from being described as “nematic”, in the sense that they align but do not form ordered layers.

  8. 8.

    The ordered regions observed by Schaller et al. (2010) and Sumino et al. (2012) were in the same size range (up to 400 μm).

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  1. Department of Physics & Astronomy and Center for Neurodynamics, University of Missouri at St Louis, St Louis, MO, USA

    Sonya Bahar

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Bahar, S. (2018). Flocking, Swarming, and Communicating. In: The Essential Tension. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1054-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1054-9_8

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