It brings to mind the question of how this protest originated. Since those at the front with the banners were likely organizers of the protest, and it is clear they had other intentions for the protest, it seems like they were counting on enacting the swarming behavior.
Of course Humans resemble animal swarms, but not just during protests, during religious gatherings (Hajj, Kumbh Mela etc.), the crowds celebrating sports victories, rush-hour traffic etc.
There is a large body of research around Human crowds in different circumstances.
I think the more important word there is "swarming" and, no, the word "swarm" does not automatically imply animals as the word is used in other contexts, too.
May be rooted in the natural world, eg. locusts, but there was a Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park) book titled Swarm, about a nano-drone apocalypse (fictional novel treatment of something like Bill Joy's gray goo).
I believe the accepted understanding is that a swarm operates with emergent behavior above and beyond that of its mostly ignorant constituent individual organisms, be they ants/bees/locusts/people or HFT algos.
Of course it’s rooted in the natural world. Even technical language is analogy and metaphor to natural phenomenon.
Any reputable scientist will tell you just that.
Using swarm in the context science fiction bugs is indirection.
It could be conceptualized otherwise but in writing at large it’s almost always used as an analogy to animal behavior (like a swarm of $natural_being).
I believe what you believe the accepted understanding is is just your opinion. It’s not my understanding of it at all.
If my understanding, or belief, is only just an internet opinion, so unacceptable as to provoke this reply, would you mind sharing what yours is as a counterpoint?
Philosophically I would argue yes, all organisms are capable of swarming. I do not think any species has been able to sufficiently adapt or evolve unless in copious and sufficient populations which requires some kind of implicit understanding of sheer numbers. Swarming only requires computation at the local level. Which is to say, swarming is an emergent behavior from being able to self-organize. I would imagine most organisms have some kind of drive for attraction and repulsion, whether its mates or predators. Those two instincts can drive the computation for swarming. I'm kind of applying some semantic flourish here but avoidance is kind of vaguely high-level concept for computational behavior. It's definitely not as cut and dry as what I said but you can certainly program it that way if you have a high-level language. I'm not saying it's difficult to understand by the way, I'm saying it's hard to write out predict complex behavior from simple rules because it's hard to simulate those systems. Self-organization falls into like, computational reality theories that are way above my head but a good place to start is cellular automata's theories of complexities.
Shorter answer: almost everything living on this planet is still here because it exploits some kind of metaheuristic that increases its advantage from there being more of it. To massage your statement, I think almost everything exhibits some kind of swarm intelligence. I think it's philosophically simpler to argue the following procession of ideas that swarm intelligence is a metaheuristic algorithm, all life is capable of computing these algorithms, but then ask the question what the hell is life exactly?
I'm being handwavy here because I don't have a rigorous definition for life and therefore can't answer you directly. Some kind of computational substrate that mutates and replicates? That's von Neumann's definition I think. You could probably do without mutation! Death and radiation already provide those conditions for you. Again, I'm curious as to how we self-organize in the first place. The hard part isn't how do we know how to fit ourselves into a larger system, but how do we reduce ourselves to a single unit? What makes an individual organism at a higher-level of abstraction one cohesive thing when it's actually made of layers and layers of processes?
Do viruses swarm? If you follow what I just said, that's if viruses compute the algorithm. But do they compute at all if they're technically just data? Is information itself a computer? What are we but games within games within games?
Nature really is the best computer science teacher if you want to be brutally effective at being inefficient.
> I think almost everything exhibits some kind of swarm intelligence ... I'm being handwavy here because I don't have a rigorous definition for life
Perhaps before getting too philosophical about defining life it would be useful to provide a rigorous definition of 'swarm'. Then we can debate whether specific organisms swarm or not, as opposed to just being alive and in groups of two or more individuals.
For example, my intuition is that orangutans never swarm in the way that starlings or anchovies do.
> Nature really is the best computer science teacher if you want to be brutally effective at being inefficient.
And at the same time, it also creates enduring and resilient organisms that propagate and thrive over time scales we cannot really and truly comprehend.
The write up disappointingly only sees the value in understanding swarm behaviors from the perspective of police controlling crowds, and not from the perspective of crowds learning better swarm behaviors to prevent such authoritarian control.
Crowds are pretty good at that kind of thing already - for instance, I remember some protests a few years back where the protestors responded to the common police tactic of 'kettling', by just running like hell and scattering every time the police tried to surround them.
It worked quite well, because the police would quickly get exhausted having to reposition in heavy armor every few minutes.
I believe the technical term is emergence. It's been a back burner fascination of mine for a couple years now. I've been curious on how to apply to marketing, product traction and growth, and so on.
If anyone have any links on how it applies to human behavior, please share as a comment.
This is an awfully verbose write-up trying to glean a kind of handwavy deeper meaning behind flocking. I kind of get what its going for, you'll see a lot of interesting crowd behavior from a simple view of a predator-prey model where you replace lions consuming gazelles with arrests. A couple people have asked me about what they should wear to protests and I suggested wearing zebra stripes. If enough people do it, it makes it hard to visually track what direction people are going in when they disperse and has the benefit of reducing bug bites. The idea here is good though, a swarm is a decent model for how protestors should behave because their forces are about numbers whereas the police are about specialization. I mean one of the more remarkable things about protests globally is the emergence of more distinct support classes offering dedicated services. As soon as trouble brews, I see people on both sides clearing out the most vulnerable because they probably can't afford to get arrested. There's definitely a hierarchy of high-value targets unfortunately. A good example is the emergence of white shields.
If you really want to get into it, attrition models here model rates for both factions. You can simulate it yourself with a cellular automata model for a visual representation.
Appropriate considering they are literally using phalanxes.
Here's the interesting thing to me. What allows swarm behavior in humans isn't the advent of Internet technology or fancy math. Sure, social media makes it easier to coordinate immediate responses and allocate ourselves. But the only reason any of this happening is that we find ourselves having a lot of free time to actually understand each other, decide to agree on something and then organize a time and place to do it.
Aside: Dear Hacker News, if you really want to make a difference on the ground, consider offering tech stations where people can charge batteries or get service. Maybe take the time to teach people about surveillance cameras and adversarial fashion. Or you know, just tell people how to set up Signal. You might think this is low hanging fruit, but your average citizen is intimidated by it or completely isolated from the stuff that we get bored about. I know at least a good deal of us are frustrated that the average consumer is not more savvy or protective of their digital rights. What's beautiful about computer technology to me is how we help each other by teaching people to help themselves. Not everyone needs to know DevOps, but getting a community to switch from unencrypted messaging is fun and simple if you show them how easy it is.
Back to business:
It's kind of a coding rite of passage to cook up the physics for a flocking system. Reynold's boids model is a masterful demonstration in how to intuitively understand class behavior.
My boss once asked me if we would ever be able to compute the complex behavior of bird swarms. I immediately flipped around and said yes, one day in the distant future of 1986. A bit snarky. I regretted it immediately. He just expressed disappointment by how simple it ended up being. I explained that its just a model of understanding and elegant for it, real life behavior is a lot more chaotic and nuanced than this toy. In 2D it runs pretty well, and it's a decent stress test on GPUs if you can also generalize the structure to take advantage of 3D engines.
Another interesting take on swarming behavior is the study of convexity in the generalized raptor problem. The discrete version of this problem is a kind of flavor of the N-Queens problem. Basically you're solving for an ODE so the police on all sides can't get you.
> Dear Hacker News, if you really want to make a difference on the ground...
At risk of being cynical, dear Hacker News - avoid protests and think about how to be effective if you want to get involved in politics. I can count on not very many fingers how many times I've seen protests accomplish anything useful.
Protests, as a political tool, are for minority opinions to keep themselves in the spotlight using tactics a little bit like a pufferfish. If an opinion has the numbers there are much more effective political routes to take.
Political success, ultimately, comes from persuading neutral parties to support a cause or even at a pinch political opponents to become neutrals. Waving placards and chanting doesn't actually do either of those things effectively. Door-knocking and pamphlet distribution is more effective and more sustainable.
Like I said, thats if you want to make a difference on the ground. Emphasis on the ground. Obviously that's just one battle when there's a war to win. Readers can decide for themselves if going outside right now is a good idea or not. Campaign methods that involve direct contact or visiting people is probably not good advice in my opinion for certain countries.
In good spirit, I would like to challenge your argument that protests are just a tool for minority opinions. I wholeheartedly disagree. Nonviolence collective action is one of the most powerful things about democracy. It is by no means a tactic. It may not have a cohesive strategy, but these movements can and do work the numbers games. For me at least, protests can define entire generations of politics well beyond the scope of elected representatives careers or laws that are passed. Anyways, the real meat of my argument: These events define our social contract. They are what define the timeline, not election dates and not term limits. Because ultimately what protests do is either refute or legitimize the value of a single vote. How many modern democracies were formed from rebelling against colonial or imperial rule?
I agree with you there that political success can be derived from persuading neutral parties or neutralizing opponents. However, I would not say ultimately, as you know that neither you nor I can predict chaos. We take polls, we make bets, and then everything's on the table because people don't make rational decisions.
You're right to be cynical. Everything we say and do either gains or loses votes for each side. Protests do need to be aware of the fact that issues are measured in salience, candidates based on congruence. There's this statistical idea of the "median voter", that frames the argument persuasively for me. Success comes from actually winning. And sometimes you have to remind people to stop being losers. We do not need a moment the opposition can then use to galvanize and consolidate their power, which they've already tried to artificially justify anyways.
Note: I have a distinctly American bias on what is appropriate for campaign strategy here that may seem obvious but I have tried my best to generalize my understanding of how election mechanisms work internationally as well.
It seems to me that one of the purposes of protests is that they allow people to exert pressure when they do not have the numbers. That's important because it forces governments to provide for the needs of all citizens not just the majority.
I'm somewhat skeptical of the ability of politics to bring about meaningful change in the United States. It seems to me that a combination of propaganda from those in power and a political system that's biased towards the status quo is almost insurmountable. It just doesn't seem like face to face persuasion scales the way that media propaganda does.
Protests do successfully force acknowledgment of problems from the majority of the population, that can be closed to different ideas trough other means.
They do also have a large amount of success in establishing as public knowledge that an idea is well supported, despite mainstream information channels claiming otherwise.
And finally, they have the form people take when fighting anti-democratic actions. What is a completely different action, but looks exactly alike from the outside.
And didn't work so well in 56 and 68. It only worked for the Baltics and the rest in 89/90 because the Soviet Union was already falling apart, thanks to mismanagement of the economy.
Police have institutional memory. For example a demo in Trafalgar Square. For more than a century the authorities have known how to control that space.
If their masters want a riot in order to discredit the protest then that can be arranged. If they want the protest to be a damp squib then that can be arranged.
The protest will be made up of participants that were not there twenty years ago. They are newbies. They will behave predictably.
I suggest the author look to the history of protest rather than Africa's Rift Valley.
https://youtu.be/U1VdhQbfSTY
It brings to mind the question of how this protest originated. Since those at the front with the banners were likely organizers of the protest, and it is clear they had other intentions for the protest, it seems like they were counting on enacting the swarming behavior.