Collective Behavior
Many bodies, one motion
Crowds, flocks, markets, and movements all share a mathematics. None of them is steered from the centre; each follows local rules that add up to large motion. The Anthropocene will not be governed by a committee, but it can be turned by understanding how eight billion local rules produce one global trajectory, and by changing a few of those rules on purpose.
10 ways in
Social Dynamics
The study of how opinions, norms, and behaviours change across a population over time.
Open →Collective Intelligence
Problem-solving capacity that emerges from a group and exceeds what its members could achieve alone.
Open →Self-Organized Criticality
The tendency of some systems to drive themselves toward a critical state where events of every size occur.
Open →Herd Mentality
The tendency to copy the behaviour of others rather than to evaluate independently.
Open →Phase Transition
An abrupt change in the character of a system as a control parameter crosses a threshold.
Open →Agent-Based Modeling
Simulation that builds a system from the bottom up, giving each individual its own rules and letting the aggregate emerge.
Open →Synchronization
The spontaneous alignment in time of many coupled oscillators.
Open →Ant Colony Optimization
An optimisation method modelled on ants laying and following pheromone trails toward good solutions.
Open →Particle Swarm Optimization
A search method in which candidate solutions move through a solution space, pulled by their own best result and by the swarm's best.
Open →Swarm Behavior
Coordinated group motion arising from simple local rules of attraction, alignment, and avoidance.
Open →