Boids

As Wikipedia puts it:

Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object.

As with most artificial life simulations, Boids is an example of emergent behavior; that is, the complexity of Boids arises from the interaction of individual agents (the boids, in this case) adhering to a set of simple rules. The rules applied in the simplest Boids world are as follows:

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

More complex rules can be added, such as obstacle avoidance and goal seeking.

In this small project you can do exactly that:
Spawn Boids with the Spacebar
Dynamicly change influence of separation, alignment and cohesion.
Change the viewing distance and angle of every Boid
Add and remove obstacles with right click
Make them all reach the mouse with Enter

(For copyright issues the downloadable file may be sent only on request)

This was done during the first year in coding class at AIV