The assignment on digital herd behavior caught my attention because it highlights something very simple yet very common in both humans and artificial systems: when one individual moves, others often follow. In nature, this pattern can be a survival strategy, but in artificial creatures the behaviour usually comes from very basic rules. I liked how the original assignment showed that even a collection of simple robots can create a larger, coordinated pattern without any central planning.
What I found interesting is how easily this behaviour can emerge when a system is designed to react to what its neighbours are doing. Humans experience herd behaviour for social or emotional reasons, but robots show a similar outcome purely through local interactions. It raises the question of how much of what we consider “group instinct” is really driven by very small, simple rules repeated across many individuals.
Inspired by this, I imagined an extremely simple artificial creature that behaves according to one rule:
move in the same direction as the nearest creature if at least two others are doing it.
Each unit is a small, wheeled robot equipped with a basic directional sensor. It normally moves randomly, but whenever it detects two neighbours moving in the same direction, it aligns itself with them and joins the movement. It doesn’t communicate, think, or coordinate — it only reacts to local patterns.
With just this rule, a group of these robots would start to form small clusters that occasionally merge into larger groups, creating a visible form of digital herd behaviour without any advanced planning.
What this shows is that complex collective behaviour doesn’t require complex creatures. Herding can appear from very simple rules repeated across a group. It makes you wonder how many behaviours we consider “social” are actually built on mechanisms just as minimal as these.