Soft Control Flocking

This is a program to show the soft-control idea ( an nondestructive intervention method to collective behavior) proposed by Jing HAN et.al. （这个程序是请您体验“软控制”方法， 您用手指控制一个“托”（红色箭头）的移动方向和速度。通过“托”局部影响周围的邻居个体（黑色箭头）来干预整个群体的运动。 ）

By using your finger to control the direction and speed of a special individual (called 'shill', shown as a red arrow in this app), you can intervene into the collective movement of a flocking group, described by the classical Vicsek's model: each individual ( shown as the black arrow in this app) moves with the same speed but with different headings which are updated as the average of its own heading and the headings of its neighbors (distance between neighbors are less than 'vision' value). Neighbors are linked by yellow lines in this app.

Notice that the shill is NOT a leader who has big influence, but is treated as a normal individual by normal ones. So the shill only affects its neighbors with normal power as normal ones. It is an nondestructive intervention method, the local interaction rules among normal individuals are remain the same even after the shill is added. They do not be aware of the 'control'. This is why we called this method as 'soft control'.

For more information and new version of this app, pls visit http://complex.amss.ac.cn/hanjing/softcontrol/. paper <*Jing Han, Lin Wang. Nondestructive Intervention to Multi-agent Systems Through an Intelligent Agent. PLoS ONE, 2013.> introduces algorithm for an intelligent shill to synchronize a group. It is more efficient than your finger.

This app was originally written in Netlogo by Han Jing in 2014, to downloaded:
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/community/Flocking-softcontrol.

Many thanks to Dr. Huang Pengcheng(黄鹏程) who help transport this app to Android.


Any suggestions, email hanjing@amss.ac.cn.

copyright @ AMSS Jing HAN, 2016/5/25.