School and swarm
Two ways of moving as a group. Fish copy their neighbours; mosquitoes circle a point.
This piece came from watching a “school” of mosquitoes. It compares two ways of moving as a group: the school, where each fish copies the direction of its neighbours, and the swarm, where each mosquito stays near a point without following anyone.
How to read it. Alignment goes from 0 (each one on its own) to 1 (all in the same direction). Dispersion is the mean distance to the central point. With the three controls you can move from one behaviour to the other and see when the group stops being a school.
How it’s made. It is an agent simulation running in the browser: 70 points, each with three rules (copy the neighbours, move towards the centre, drift at random). I made it with Claude.
What I learned making it. [HUECO: Camilo writes this]