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GRASP Seminar: Bernard Chazelle, Princeton University, “The Convergence of Bird Flocking”

February 27, 2009 @ 11:00 am

Abstract: We bound the time it takes for a group of birds to reach steady state in a standard flocking model. We prove that (i) within single exponential time fragmentation ceases and each bird settles on a fixed flying direction; (ii) the flocking network converges only after a number of steps that is an iterated exponential of height logarithmic in the number of birds. We show that this bound is optimal. The model directs the birds to adjust their velocities repeatedly by averaging them with their neighbors within a fixed radius. The model is deterministic, but we show that it can tolerate a reasonable amount of stochastic or adversarial noise.

Presenter

Bernard Chazelle is currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Yale University in 1980 and his B.Sc and M.Sc in Applied Mathematics from ENSMP in Paris in 1977. Dr. Chazelle’s main research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, computational geometry and computational biology.

Details

Date:
February 27, 2009
Time:
11:00 am
Event Category: