English

Information Flow in Finite Flocks

Statistical Mechanics 2018-09-12 v1

Abstract

We simulate the canonical Vicsek model and estimate the flow of information as a function of noise (the variability in the extent to which each animal aligns with its neighbours). We show that the global transfer entropy for finite flocks not only fails to peak near the phase transition, as demonstrated for the canonical 2D Ising model, but remains constant from the transition to very low noise values. This provides a foundation for future study regarding information flow in more complex models and real-world flocking data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.03723,
  title  = {Information Flow in Finite Flocks},
  author = {Joshua Brown and Terry Bossomaier and Lionel Barnett},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.03723},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures, 1 ancillary file (supplemental materials)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:01:57.091Z