Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model
SIGGRAPH '87 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Fundamental problems of algorithmic algebra
Fundamental problems of algorithmic algebra
Distributed Coordination Control of Multiagent Systems While Preserving Connectedness
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual symposium on Computational geometry
A geometric approach to collective motion
Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual symposium on Computational geometry
Direction election in flocking swarms
Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing
ICALP'10 Proceedings of the 37th international colloquium conference on Automata, languages and programming: Part II
A tight runtime bound for synchronous gathering of autonomous robots with limited visibility
Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Fast convergence for consensus in dynamic networks
ICALP'11 Proceedings of the 38th international conference on Automata, languages and programming - Volume Part II
Physarum can compute shortest paths
Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Flocking based distributed self-deployment algorithms in mobile sensor networks
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Optimal and competitive runtime bounds for continuous, local gathering of mobile robots
Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Collaborative search on the plane without communication
PODC '12 Proceedings of the 2012 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
A slime mold solver for linear programming problems
CiE'12 Proceedings of the 8th Turing Centenary conference on Computability in Europe: how the world computes
Computing with large populations using interactions
MFCS'12 Proceedings of the 37th international conference on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
Physarum can compute shortest paths: A short proof
Information Processing Letters
Memory lower bounds for randomized collaborative search and implications for biology
DISC'12 Proceedings of the 26th international conference on Distributed Computing
Direction election in flocking swarms
Ad Hoc Networks
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We provide further evidence that the study of complex self-organizing systems can benefit from an algorithmic perspective. The subject has been traditionally viewed through the lens of physics and control theory. Using tools typically associated with theoretical computer science, we settle an old question in theoretical ecology: bounding the convergence of bird flocks. We bound the time to reach steady state by a tower-of-twos of height linear in the number of birds. We prove that, surprisingly, the tower-of-twos growth is intrinsic to the model. This unexpected result demonstrates the merits of approaching biological dynamical systems as "natural algorithms" and applying algorithmic techniques to them.