Scientists Discovered How Starlings Stay in Formation, Want to Use it to Create a Swarm of Robots

Alex

Scientists have discovered how thousands of starling birds can fly in formation without colliding with each other.

Naturally, they're now applying what they've learned to make ... swarms of robots:

... it turns out that the secret is for each bird to track seven others, says the first detailed direct observations to have been reported by STARFLAG - Starlings in Flight - a European project involving biologists, physicists, and economists. [...]

The team also concludes that the birds are smarter than was thought. “An interaction based upon the number of neighbours, rather than their distance, implies rather complex cognitive capabilities in birds,” adds Irene Giardina, a fellow researcher, of the Centre for Statistical Mechanics and Complexity in Rome.

Link - via Environmental Graffiti, thanks Chris Ingham Brooke!


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I stood for an hour just watching THIS happen in front of me:

http://www.revver.com/video/140234/birds-flying-strange-formations/

I cannot wait to see it with robots. Let's go, Science!!
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The question of whether people think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old is not simple to address, and along with other topics related to evolution, depends heavily on how you word questions. One commonly cited survey puts that at ~40%, but has a lot of baggage in the question, with those ~40% choosing, "God created humans beings in pretty much their present form at one time within the last 10000 years." The other two options involve evolution of some sort. Another survey directly asking if a person thinks the Earth is less than 10,000 years old found only ~20% agreement and ~10% unsures. If asking do they agree with the idea that continents have been moving for millions of years, only ~10% disagree with another 10% unsure.

You can ask the same things to the same people worded slightly different ways, and still get rather different results. For example, changing a question from asking did humans develop other animals to did animals and plants develop from other species can give a large difference, or explicitly including God in a question about a process will change the results compared to asking about the same thing without naming God.

People are kind of fickle when it comes to asking questions, even without all of the religious and political baggage that comes up in such surveys. A project researching how to teach basic physics once found, for basic homework questions, asking a person a question, then asking them "What answer would a smart student give?" caused some people to change their answer...
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