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starlings

An agent-based model and simulation of starling murmuration. Starling video

Theory

The model is based overwhelmingly on the paper 'Self-organized aerial displays of thousands of starlings: a model' by H. Hildenbrandt C. Carere and C.K. Hemelrijka. It's available for free here. (Wow, isn't Open Access academia lovely?)

History

I made this as my project for MATH 437 Mathematical Methods in Biology at McGill University in the 2017 Winter Term with Aashna Uppal.

What's here

The project was written in Processing 3, which looks a lot like Java. It's also the language I first learnt to code in (thank you you great people!) I've included two folders.

starlings_topology

This is the 'culmination' of the project and includes most of the features discussed in the paper above as well as a few (I feel) nicer implementations.

To run

Download the most recent version of Processing 3 and the rest will be plug-in and play.

fish_sliders

This is a bonus to let you play with the 'social forces' of the agents: cohesion, separation and alignment. Without 'topological interaction', a key element of the starling simulation, the agents look more like fish.

To run

Download the most recent version of Processing 3 as well as a library called Control5.