We consider flocks of artificial birds and study the emergence of V-like formations during flight. We introduce a small set of fully distributed positioning rules to guide the birds' movements and demonstrate, by means of simulations, that they tend to lead to stabilization into several of the well-known V-like formations that have been observed in nature. We also provide quantitative indicators that we believe are closely related to achieving V-like formations, and study their behavior over a large set of independent simulations.
@article{arxiv.cs/0611032,
title = {V-like formations in flocks of artificial birds},
author = {Andre Nathan and Valmir C. Barbosa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0611032},
year = {2008}
}