6 ms·

Do Human crowds during protests resemble animal swarming behavior?

49 points by op03 6y ago

ARandomerDude 6y ago
Definitely. Look how they spray paint, topple, and burn their own country.
xkcd-sucks 6y ago
Philosophically: Yes
- sn41 6y ago
  I am not sure whether every flock is a swarm.
Descartes1 6y ago
Not unless animals coordinate using iPhones and feed on lattes.
oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
By definition and pedantry: yes. Humans are animals.
- tmh88j 6y ago
  No one would argue that humans aren't animals, but do all animals swarm? Genuinely curious, not trying to be a smart-ass.
  - odomojuli 6y ago
    Because you're curious you get my curious answer. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metaphor-based_metaheuristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metaphor-based_metaheu...
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > 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.
    - AnonHP 6y ago
      > 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.
    - andygcook 6y ago
      By the prose formation, this seems like a GPT-3 generated comment.
- c3534l 6y ago
  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.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    What other contexts? As far as I know, it's only used by way of analogy to animal swarms: e.g. Docker Swarm.
    - techbio 6y ago
      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.
      - nfkro 6y ago
        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.
        techbio 6y ago
        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?
- keiferski 6y ago
  The implied meaning is ‘other animals’ which is obvious to all the non-pedants in the world.
odomojuli 6y ago
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. http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-warfare http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-warfare 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. Here's a link to Daniel Shiffman's excellent write up and code examples illustrating the phenomena: https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/ https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/ 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.
082349872349872 6y ago
yes (comparing bos taurus with homo sapiens): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23625491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23625491
tomohawk 6y ago
Resemble, maybe, but here is an example of humans using a protest as cover for an attack. https://youtu.be/U1VdhQbfSTY 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.
Theodores 6y ago
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.
bobosha 6y ago
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.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  Also music festivals.
- mellow2020 6y ago
  The movies "Baraka" and "Samsara", both by the same makers, come to mind.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    I have only seen Samsara. I found it strangely beautiful but very stressful. The human swarms in it are really unnerving.
kyleblarson 6y ago
Humans are animals so yes, although they are likely the only species that will try to burn down federal courthouses.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
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. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/emergence/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/emergence/
pinkskin 6y ago
Some of therm do,and some of them are. They should stop calling them protest and call them what they are.
lo_fye 6y ago
We are animals, so I’d guess yes.
kazagistar 6y ago
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.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  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.

49 points by op03 6y ago

ARandomerDude 6y ago

Definitely. Look how they spray paint, topple, and burn their own country.

xkcd-sucks 6y ago

Philosophically: Yes

sn41 6y ago
I am not sure whether every flock is a swarm.

Descartes1 6y ago

Not unless animals coordinate using iPhones and feed on lattes.

oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago

By definition and pedantry: yes. Humans are animals.

tmh88j 6y ago
No one would argue that humans aren't animals, but do all animals swarm? Genuinely curious, not trying to be a smart-ass.
- odomojuli 6y ago
  Because you're curious you get my curious answer. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metaphor-based_metaheuristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metaphor-based_metaheu...
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > 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.
  - AnonHP 6y ago
    > 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.
  - andygcook 6y ago
    By the prose formation, this seems like a GPT-3 generated comment.
c3534l 6y ago
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.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  What other contexts? As far as I know, it's only used by way of analogy to animal swarms: e.g. Docker Swarm.
  - techbio 6y ago
    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.
    - nfkro 6y ago
      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.
      - techbio 6y ago
        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?
keiferski 6y ago
The implied meaning is ‘other animals’ which is obvious to all the non-pedants in the world.

odomojuli 6y ago

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. http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-warfare http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-warfare 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. Here's a link to Daniel Shiffman's excellent write up and code examples illustrating the phenomena: https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/ https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/ 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.

082349872349872 6y ago

yes (comparing bos taurus with homo sapiens): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23625491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23625491

tomohawk 6y ago

Resemble, maybe, but here is an example of humans using a protest as cover for an attack. https://youtu.be/U1VdhQbfSTY 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.

Theodores 6y ago

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.

bobosha 6y ago

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.

dillonmckay 6y ago
Also music festivals.
mellow2020 6y ago
The movies "Baraka" and "Samsara", both by the same makers, come to mind.
- bmitc 6y ago
  I have only seen Samsara. I found it strangely beautiful but very stressful. The human swarms in it are really unnerving.

kyleblarson 6y ago

Humans are animals so yes, although they are likely the only species that will try to burn down federal courthouses.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

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. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/emergence/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/emergence/

pinkskin 6y ago

Some of therm do,and some of them are. They should stop calling them protest and call them what they are.

lo_fye 6y ago

We are animals, so I’d guess yes.

kazagistar 6y ago

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.

pasabagi 6y ago
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.