Environmental path-entropy and collective motion

Abstract

Inspired by the swarming or flocking of animal systems we study groups of agents moving in unbounded 2D space. Individual trajectories derive from a ``bottom-up'' principle: individuals reorient to maximise their future path entropy over environmental states. This can be seen as a proxy for keeping options open, a principle that may confer evolutionary fitness in an uncertain world. We find an ordered (co-aligned) state naturally emerges, as well as disordered states or rotating clusters; similar phenotypes are observed in birds, insects and fish, respectively. The ordered state exhibits an order-disorder transition under two forms of noise: (i) standard additive orientational noise, applied to the post-decision orientations (ii) ``cognitive'' noise, overlaid onto each individual's model of the future paths of other agents. Unusually, the order increases at low noise, before later decreasing through the order-disorder transition as the noise increases further.

Corrected bibliography (removing erroneous refs.), Published 19 April 2023 Phys. Rev. Lett

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