Boids Simulation

What are boids?

For my 10th grade science fair project, I studied artificial intelligence and its inspiration from nature through the lens of emergent behavior and distributed agent systems and in particular by writing a graphical simulation in Python based off of the boids algorithm developed by Craig Reynolds. In other words, I created life modeled after birds or fish through the interactions of dumb particles which can flock, avoid obstacles while seeking goals, and even hunt in packs!

Screenshots of simulation in action. From left to right: predator/prey simulation, obstacle avoidance, and good old flocking.

Awards

This project won 1st place out of the entire high school for the science fair.

But wait, there’s more!

I have been keeping this project under somewhat active development and any ideas, recommendations, and even code requests are welcome. Currently, I am eyeing adding a genetic algorithm to optimize the weights of the various boid rules.

I have open sourced the code, and you can check it out on Github here . It is pretty neat if I may say so myself, so feel free to just clone and run it if this piques your interest.

If you are really interested, you can even check out the paper I submitted for it (all 18 pages worth), here although it is in French which might be a barrier.