A common hypothesis about the origins of collective behaviour suggests that animals might live and move in groups to increase their chances of surviving predator attacks. This hypothesis is supported by several studies that use computational models to simulate natural evolution. These studies, however, either tune an ad-hoc model to 'reproduce' collective behaviour, or concentrate on a single t...

Collective behaviour is often characterised by the so-called “coordination paradox”: Looking at individual ants, for example, they do not seem to cooperate or communicate explicitly, but nevertheless at the social level cooperative behaviour, such as nest building, emerges, apparently without any central coordination. In the case of social insects such emergent coordination has been explained b...

The complexity of large-scale distributed systems, particularly when deployed in physical space, calls for new mechanisms to address composability and reusability of collective adaptive behaviour. Computational fields have been proposed as an effective abstraction to fill the gap between the macro-level of such systems (specifying a system’s collective behaviour) and the micro-level (individual...

This paper provides an empirical contribution to the current debate about the suitability of the collective model proposed by Chiappori (1988, 1992) for analysing intrahousehold behaviour in the labour supply context. We follow Chiappori et al.(2002) and we extend the model considering differences in the education level between the two members of the couple as a potential distribution factor. M...

We identify a unique viewpoint on the collective behaviour of intelligent agents. We first develop a highly general abstract model for the possible future lives these agents may encounter as a result of their decisions. In the context of these possibilities, we show that the causal entropic principle, whereby agents follow behavioural rules that maximize their entropy over all paths through the...

A new study has decoded which birds become leaders in homing pigeon flocks, finding an unexpected benefit of leadership: faster birds emerge as leaders, and these leaders learn more about their environment than their followers.

Establishing how collective behaviour emerges is central to our understanding of animal societies. Previous research has highlighted how universal interaction rules shape collective behaviour, and that individual differences can drive group functioning. Groups themselves may also differ considerably in their collective behaviour, but little is known about the consistency of such group variation...

The most startling examples of collective animal behaviour are provided by very large and cohesive groups moving in three dimensions. Paradigmatic examples are bird flocks, fish schools and insect swarms. However, because of the sheer technical difficulty of obtaining 3D data, empirical studies conducted to date have only considered loose groups of a few tens of animals. Moreover, these studies...

Joshua Garland, a) Andrew M. Berdahl, 2 Jie Sun, 4, 5, 6 and Erik Bollt 6, 7 2 Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501 3 School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, 4 WA 98195 5 Department of Mathematics, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY 13699 6 Department of Physics, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY 13699 7 Department of Computer Science, Clarkson University, Potsda...