Boids Classic

What is it?

This is an implementation of boids algorithm, used to simulate the flocking behaviour of birds.

As with most artificial life simulations, Boids is an example of emergent behavior; that is, the complexity of Boids arises from the interaction of individual agents (the boids, in this case) adhering to a set of simple rules. The rules applied in the simplest Boids world are as follows:

• separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
• alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
• cohesion: steer to move toward the average position (center of mass) of local flockmates

You can find more information on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids

This implementation almost directly follows pseudocode on www.kfish.org/boids/pseudocode.html , but provides neat GUI to increase flexibility - in real-time one can change coefficients, affecting boids behaviour. The use of Kd-tree structure made it possible to support real-time simulation of numerous boids.

Contents

The project includes following files:

• Bird.java - implements Bird class, which incorporates vectors of position and velocity, methods to simulate flocking behaviour.
• Boids.java - represents flock of birds, contains methods to update each bird's position and velocity depending on it's neighbours.
• BoidsVisualisation.java - provides basic but flexible GUI.
• Vector.java - class to represent an N-dimentional vector.

How to run

Simply compile project files with java compiler (with kd.jar included), then run BoidsVisualisation.