"This report would be incomplete without a rough estimate of the actual performance of the system. With a flock of 80 boids, using the naive O(N^2) algorithm (and so 6400 individual boid-to-boid comparisons), on a single Lisp Machine without any special hardware accelerators, the simulation ran for about 95 seconds per frame. A ten-second (300 frame) motion test took about eight hours of real time to produce."
I think I had decided that I just didn't understand the material. Now I think that the article wasn't a technical paper and I didn't know any better at the time. Your link to the original paper (!) is most certainly welcome. I've finally decided to get back to some graphics programming and this would be a fun exercise.
Just uploaded it to my bitbucket repository in case anyone is interested.
https://github.com/piskvorky/PredatorPrey
I remember decoupling the simulation speed from graphics rendering speed (aka frame rate) and AI thinking speed was a lot of fun!
Not necessarily for anyone who's not comfortable with the math, but a very rewarding a mind opening read.
Even if you know about some areas already.
http://www.cs.rit.edu/~bpd9116/WebGLU/examples/boids/boids.h...
https://gist.github.com/3733089
and a demo:
http://wsb.im/flocking/index.html
Definitely fun stuff to play around with.
(hey Rune!)
For example, whats the fastest data structure/algorithm to make searching for neighbours?
In straight js and canvas, with bird silhouettes and Perlin sky
