wolf359 opened this issue on Jun 26, 2004 ยท 22 posts
ockham posted Sun, 27 June 2004 at 12:05 PM
The Swarm script already does (a). You begin
with a chosen container. The script fills the
bounding box of the container with particles,
all parented to the container. Each particle
stays within the bounding box in its subsequent
moves. So you can make the gnats fly
(more or less) together by moving the container.
Point (b) is interesting. Strict mathematical
randomizing is unsatisfactory for biological
purposes. I used to write programs for perception
experiments, and found that I had to cheat to avoid
clusters and "winning streaks". (With pure
randomizing, the program would play Clip 1 several
times in a row, then Clip 4 several times in a row,
and so on. This doesn't sound random to a human
observer, and leads to unwanted conditioning.)
You're describing a similar problem in
spatial terms. I'll play around and see
how it needs to be cheated!
Message edited on: 06/27/2004 12:06