Yet another news item for artificial life! BBC News has a new article called Mystery of Bird 'V' Formation Solved. It details how a french team managed to determine how pelicans glide more efficiently by flying behind other birds, thereby saving energy (similar to what professional cyclists do in the Tour de France, except in the air of course :).

The beauty of the entire phenomenon lies in the seemingly intelligent group behaviour that emerges from multiple individual animals: birds fly optimally in organised flocks. There has been a fair amount of research into this area of artificial life, the most popular being that of Craig Renolds (see the Boids page). In this approach, each bird is controlled by very simple rules telling it for example to stay away from other birds nearby. Combining such simple rules together in multi-agent systems surprisingly produces emergent intelligence. However, phenomenon such as aero-dynamics and energy savings have yet to be modelled, but no doubt they'd be able to produce flocks displaying such 'V' patterns.