Complexity and Fly Swarms

Complexity is the study of phenomena that emerge from a collection of interacting objects and arises in many systems throughout physics, biology, finance, economics and more. Certain kinds of complex systems can be described by self-organized criticality (SOC). An SOC system is one that is internally driven towards some critical state. Recent experimental work suggests scaling behavior of fly swarms--one of the hallmarks of an SOC system. Our goal is to look for SOC behavior in computational models of fly swarms.