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Demonstrates a fictional creatures ("boids") that are capable to fly in a flock without having central, coordinating leader.

• Hold left mouse button to scare the flock (boids start flying away from the perceived center)
• Hold the right mouse button to make the boids uncooperative (each start flying on its own without caring about others)

The applet was written by Ultrastudio.org team (more exactly, Audrius Meskauskas) who was inspired by descriptions, found at http://www.vergenet.net/~conrad/boids/pseudocode.html. This site also contains much more complex applet where boids look almost like real, move wings, appear to be in the 3D worlds, cast shadows and also there is a nice picture in the background. It likely implements more rules than the minimal set, described in the article. However no source code is available for Java, while there is a source code for boid implementations in some other languages.

The applet currently does not accept any parameters but detects the applet boundaries and uses all available area for animation. It also self-tunes to the processor speed.

The latest version of the source code is available here