Algorithms Bring Us Together
Algorithms are the mechanisms for connectivity, allowing us to experience and share the extraordinary.
A Summer Spectacle
During the month of September each year, Chapman Elementary School in Northwest Portland plays host to an incredible spectacle of nature. Each night at dusk, thousands of Vaux’s swifts — small birds that spend most of their time in flight — flock around and then enter into the chimney of the school.
While this unusual phenomenon is astonishing in its own right, it is the reaction people have to it that is truly extraordinary. Hundreds of families come to watch the birds’ behavior, creating an incredible community event around this natural occurrence. They populate the park’s slope in awe, with most eyes focused on the mouth of the chimney.
Many of these families will make return trips, visiting the swifts multiple times during the season, or even during the same week. Every night, the performance is slightly different, depending on the number of birds and environmental circumstances, making each one a unique experience. Lucky spectators might even get the opportunity to see a hawk attempting to enter the flock, forcing the birds to completely alter their structure as they break their pattern to scare off the predator. When this occurs, the crowd bursts into collective “oohs” and “ahhs,” and often, resounding applause.
While this unusual phenomenon is astonishing in its own right, it is the reaction people have to it that is truly extraordinary.
The Incredible Phenomenon of Flocking
These captivating formations occur due to flocking — the collective motion of animals such as birds, bees, and fish. Kevin Kelly describes the phenomenon eloquently:
Suddenly, cued by some imperceptible signal, a thousand birds rise as one thing. They lift themselves into the air in a great thunder. As they take off they pull up a thousand more birds from the surface of the lake with them, as if they were all but part of a reclining giant now rising. The monstrous beast hovers in the air, swerves to the east sun, and then, in a blink, reverses direction, turning itself inside out. A second later, the entire swarm veers west and away, as if steered by a single mind.
This collective behavior is not due to the leadership of a single bird. Kelly explains that “a flocking bird is blind to the grace and cohesiveness of a flock in flight. So how can thousands of individuals make local decisions, devoid of communication with all other birds in the flock, and not produce a chaotic mess? Interestingly, while this self-organization appears chaotic, it is actually highly organized. There is a very straightforward explanation behind this complex phenomenon — an algorithm. The algorithm governing flocking behavior is an explicit set of three rules: cohesion, separation, and alignment. All individuals follow a cohesion rule, or an attempt to stay as close together as possible. They also adhere to a separation principle, where they must avoid colliding. Finally, each agent in the flock obeys an alignment rule, where it follows the same direction as its neighbors.
The Beautiful Patterns Created With Algorithms
The magical movements of flocking birds that result from this rule set is made possible by the incredible power of algorithms. While algorithms are best known as the tools that digitally augment our world, intertwined with all aspects of our daily lives, they are also present in our analog world, connecting us across generations and across cultures.
The magical movements of flocking birds that result from this rule set is made possible by the incredible power of algorithms.
The beautiful performance of Vaux’s swifts at Chapman Elementary School is not specific to Portland. Starlings in Denmark migrate in the thousands together in the late spring and early summer, making incredible movements across the marshlands. To stay safe, the birds travel in a tight spherical formation, which has given them the nickname “black sun.” Starling murmurations are seen across all of Europe, Africa, and Australia too.
What connects these distant locations is the pure delight felt by all who watch birds flocking. While we might want to understand how flocks form, it is often the child-like wonder experienced that truly matters. Across the world, people find discernible patterns in their movements, which have been described as “mathematical abstractions written across the sky.” These patterns are the embodiment of algorithms.
Algorithms Bring Us Together
These algorithms, while simple, enable the extraordinary to take place. Flocks of birds, following only three rules, bring communities together across the world around a beautiful algorithmic performance. This is the power of computation — the capacity of a system to transform one state into another.
Back in Portland, computation transforms flocks into dynamic performances moving through the evening sky. But perhaps more impressively, and certainly more importantly, on those same evenings, a quiet school playground is transformed into a hill overtaken by families and friends, all sharing the breathtaking experience of algorithms.
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