Boids!

Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds, and related group motion.

Boids uses three simple rules to work accurately:

• separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
• alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
• cohesion: steer to move towards the average position (center of mass) of local flockmates

TL;DR Boids is a program that can create really cool swarm intelligences and can simulate basically real flocks of birds, schools of fish and stuff like that.

Technology

-The visual/graphics run on pygame (An python library to make 2D graphics.python) to run the visuals.

• numpy is used to run more complex mathmatical calculations to caclulate boids three rules.
• GitHub Copilot was used to optimize my bad math calculations + adding multithreading.

Run it Yourself!

That's cool and all but how do I run it myself?

Warning

This code uses a lot (~1GB) of RAM and threads. This is due to how the optimization techniques work and I do not guarantee it will work on your local machine, if it doesn't post a GitHub issue but I can't promise anything

• Make sure you have Python installed.
• Next, clone the repo and move to that directory.
• Run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Last, run python3 main.py!

Controls

• R - Add boids
• CLICK - Add boid
• - - Remove boids
• B - Change boid mode (different filters and styles!)
• C - Change color of boids

Change stats

Well, the code is open-source! So you can play around with it, if you want a low-code solution check out the ALL CAPS variables at the top of main.py to edit them, the names are pretty self explanatory. Here are the defaults:

COLORS = {"BLUE": (12, 18, 226),"RED": (255, 0, 0),"GREEN": (0, 255, 0),"YELLOW": (255, 255, 0),"ORANGE": (255, 165, 0),"PURPLE": (128, 0, 128),"PINK": (255, 192, 203),"CYAN": (0, 255, 255),"WHITE": (255, 255, 255),"BLACK": (0, 0, 0),"GRAY": (128, 128, 128),"BROWN": (165, 42, 42), "GRAY": (128, 128, 128)}
HEIGHT = 750
WIDTH = 1250
BG_COLOR = (255, 255, 255)
VISION_COLOR = (200, 200, 200)
SHOW_VISION = False
BOID_SIZE = 5
BOID_TYPE = "lights"
VISION_RADIUS = 20
BOIDS_COUNT = 1000
TRANSPARENCY_VALUE = 5
BOID_COLOR = COLORS["RED"]

To change a color use an RGB format, some preset colors can be pasted in:

• COLORS["BLUE"]
• COLORS["RED"]
• COLORS["GREEN"]
• COLORS["YELLOW"]
• COLORS["ORANGE"]
• COLORS["PURPLE"]
• COLORS["PINK"]
• COLORS["CYAN"]
• COLORS["WHITE"]
• COLORS["BLACK"]
• COLORS["GRAY"]
• COLORS["BROWN"]