Flock

A large number of animals, especially birds, sheep or goats.

Flock or flocking may refer to:

Computing

Entertainment

People

Consensus dynamics

Consensus dynamics or agreement dynamics is an area of research lying at the intersection of systems theory and graph theory. A major topic of investigation is the agreement or consensus problem in multi-agent systems that concerns processes by which a collection of interacting agents achieve a common goal. Networks of agents that exchange information to reach consensus include: physiological systems, gene networks, large-scale energy systems and fleets of vehicles on land, in the air or in space. The agreement protocol or consensus protocol is an unforced dynamical system that is governed by the interconnection topology and the initial condition for each agent. Other problems are the rendezvous problem, synchronization, flocking, formation control. One solution paradigm is distributed constraint reasoning

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Flocking (behavior)

Flocking behavior is the behavior exhibited when a group of birds, called a flock, are foraging or in flight. There are parallels with the shoaling behavior of fish, the swarming behavior of insects, and herd behavior of land animals.

Computer simulations and mathematical models which have been developed to emulate the flocking behaviors of birds can generally be applied also to the "flocking" behavior of other species. As a result, the term "flocking" is sometimes applied, in computer science, to species other than birds.

This article is about the modelling of flocking behavior. From the perspective of the mathematical modeller, "flocking" is the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities and is a collective animal behavior exhibited by many living beings such as birds, fish, bacteria, and insects. It is considered an emergent behavior arising from simple rules that are followed by individuals and does not involve any central coordination.

Flocking behavior was first simulated on a computer in 1987 by Craig Reynolds with his simulation program, Boids. This program simulates simple agents (boids) that are allowed to move according to a set of basic rules. The result is akin to a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a swarm of insects.