Top
In this video you can see honey bees producing patterns across the hive by flapping their wings in sync with each other.
The logic followed by each bee is fairly simple:
- Flaps wings when it's agitated
- This causes the neighbour bees to flap their wings as well
- Bees rest for a while after flapping their wings, because the waves travel forwards
I implemented these rules in the below program, with some randomness introduced at each step. Click on the grid to activate a bee.
Forward latency decides how long a bee waits after its neighbour has flapped its wings. It's expected to be inversely proportional to the agitation level of the bees. Forward probability decides how likely a bee is to activate after its neighbour has flapped its wings. It's expected to be directly proportional to how agitated the bees are. That is what we see in the simulation. Preset 2 looks more aggressive than preset 1.
A new kind of science
Phenomena like this were motivation behind the computational physics introduced by Stephen Wolfram in his book 'A new kind of science'. He argues that the traditional mathematical approach to physics may be limiting and that computational models offer a more robust framework for understanding complexity in the natural world.