
A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows - mnemonicsloth
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.1381
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gjm11
The weird thing is that this appears to be quite serious (although it contains
jokes, and quite right too), and motivated by a genuine need to understand the
dynamics of coupled cow ensembles.

And there's an interesting and nonobvious result: you can increase the
coupling between your cows and get their behaviour to synchronize _less_.
(Although that's only true for a particular configuration of which cows
interact with which others, and it's probably not realistic.) Their main
example of this isn't quite as surprising as it sounds, to me at least:
there's some lag in the influence of one cow on another, and the situation in
which increased coupling reduces synchronization is one where there are long
chains of mutually influencing cows.

I loved this sentence, from the second page: "Cattle are ruminants, so it is
biologically plausible to view them as oscillators."

The paper actually has pictures in it showing spherical cows. The
acknowledgements say: "We thank [...] Puck Rombach for assistance with cow
puns, and Yulian Ng for drawing a spherical cow for us." Obviously it's a fair
assumption that everyone reading their paper is familiar with the joke.

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hugh3
Standing up? Lying down? Apparently they're using some kind of nonspherical
cow approximation.

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mnemonicsloth
Yes. They also use behavior differences between summer and winter to motivate
the study, so an atmosphere is implicit.

Despite all its successes, we've known for years that someday we'd have to
move beyond the Standard Model.

~~~
eru
I hope we can avoid incorporating friction for a while.

~~~
hugh3
Only if your farm is flat. Otherwise all your cows wind up at the bottom of
the hill.

~~~
hugh3
Actually this gives me an idea for a spherical-cow Farmville clone in which
all cows are simulated with simple yet physically justifiable parameters...

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jerf
I was trying to figure out if this model is Turing-complete but couldn't
rapidly prove it either way. Still, with chaotic dynamics in the model I think
the odds are pretty decent that something could be found, although it would of
course require absurd levels of precision by the cows even if the model was
simple, and could require _truly_ absurd levels if it does end up requiring
the chaos.

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snikolov
Steven Strogatz has studied (and to a large extent popularized) mathematical
models of synchronization of fireflies (and many other things). Here's an
interesting TED talk by him about synchronization in general:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html>

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wingo
<http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25171/>

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ddddave
Consider a spherical cow...

