
Do Human crowds during protests resemble animal swarming behavior? - op03
https://www.wired.com/story/what-the-science-of-animal-networks-reveals-about-protests/
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tomohawk
Resemble, maybe, but here is an example of humans using a protest as cover for
an attack.

[https://youtu.be/U1VdhQbfSTY](https://youtu.be/U1VdhQbfSTY)

It brings to mind the question of how this protest originated. Since those at
the front with the banners were likely organizers of the protest, and it is
clear they had other intentions for the protest, it seems like they were
counting on enacting the swarming behavior.

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bobosha
Of course Humans resemble animal swarms, but not just during protests, during
religious gatherings (Hajj, Kumbh Mela etc.), the crowds celebrating sports
victories, rush-hour traffic etc.

There is a large body of research around Human crowds in different
circumstances.

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mellow2020
The movies "Baraka" and "Samsara", both by the same makers, come to mind.

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bmitc
I have only seen Samsara. I found it strangely beautiful but very stressful.
The human swarms in it are really unnerving.

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oehtXRwMkIs
By definition and pedantry: yes. Humans are animals.

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c3534l
I think the more important word there is "swarming" and, no, the word "swarm"
does not automatically imply animals as the word is used in other contexts,
too.

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ForHackernews
What other contexts? As far as I know, it's only used by way of analogy to
animal swarms: e.g. Docker Swarm.

~~~
techbio
May be rooted in the natural world, eg. locusts, but there was a Michael
Crichton (author of Jurassic Park) book titled Swarm, about a nano-drone
apocalypse (fictional novel treatment of something like Bill Joy's gray goo).
I believe the accepted understanding is that a swarm operates with emergent
behavior above and beyond that of its mostly ignorant constituent individual
organisms, be they ants/bees/locusts/people or HFT algos.

~~~
nfkro
Of course it’s rooted in the natural world. Even technical language is analogy
and metaphor to natural phenomenon.

Any reputable scientist will tell you just that.

Using swarm in the context science fiction bugs is indirection.

It could be conceptualized otherwise but in writing at large it’s almost
always used as an analogy to animal behavior (like a swarm of $natural_being).

I believe what you believe the accepted understanding is is just your opinion.
It’s not my understanding of it at all.

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techbio
If my understanding, or belief, is only just an internet opinion, so
unacceptable as to provoke this reply, would you mind sharing what yours is as
a counterpoint?

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kazagistar
The write up disappointingly only sees the value in understanding swarm
behaviors from the perspective of police controlling crowds, and not from the
perspective of crowds learning better swarm behaviors to prevent such
authoritarian control.

~~~
pasabagi
Crowds are pretty good at that kind of thing already - for instance, I
remember some protests a few years back where the protestors responded to the
common police tactic of 'kettling', by just running like hell and scattering
every time the police tried to surround them.

It worked quite well, because the police would quickly get exhausted having to
reposition in heavy armor every few minutes.

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chiefalchemist
I believe the technical term is emergence. It's been a back burner fascination
of mine for a couple years now. I've been curious on how to apply to
marketing, product traction and growth, and so on.

If anyone have any links on how it applies to human behavior, please share as
a comment.

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/emergence/](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/emergence/)

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odomojuli
This is an awfully verbose write-up trying to glean a kind of handwavy deeper
meaning behind flocking. I kind of get what its going for, you'll see a lot of
interesting crowd behavior from a simple view of a predator-prey model where
you replace lions consuming gazelles with arrests. A couple people have asked
me about what they should wear to protests and I suggested wearing zebra
stripes. If enough people do it, it makes it hard to visually track what
direction people are going in when they disperse and has the benefit of
reducing bug bites. The idea here is good though, a swarm is a decent model
for how protestors should behave because their forces are about numbers
whereas the police are about specialization. I mean one of the more remarkable
things about protests globally is the emergence of more distinct support
classes offering dedicated services. As soon as trouble brews, I see people on
both sides clearing out the most vulnerable because they probably can't afford
to get arrested. There's definitely a hierarchy of high-value targets
unfortunately. A good example is the emergence of white shields.

If you really want to get into it, attrition models here model rates for both
factions. You can simulate it yourself with a cellular automata model for a
visual representation. Appropriate considering they are literally using
phalanxes.

[http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-
warfare](http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/modelling-warfare)

Here's the interesting thing to me. What allows swarm behavior in humans isn't
the advent of Internet technology or fancy math. Sure, social media makes it
easier to coordinate immediate responses and allocate ourselves. But the only
reason any of this happening is that we find ourselves having a lot of free
time to actually understand each other, decide to agree on something and then
organize a time and place to do it.

Aside: Dear Hacker News, if you really want to make a difference on the
ground, consider offering tech stations where people can charge batteries or
get service. Maybe take the time to teach people about surveillance cameras
and adversarial fashion. Or you know, just tell people how to set up Signal.
You might think this is low hanging fruit, but your average citizen is
intimidated by it or completely isolated from the stuff that we get bored
about. I know at least a good deal of us are frustrated that the average
consumer is not more savvy or protective of their digital rights. What's
beautiful about computer technology to me is how we help each other by
teaching people to help themselves. Not everyone needs to know DevOps, but
getting a community to switch from unencrypted messaging is fun and simple if
you show them how easy it is.

Back to business: It's kind of a coding rite of passage to cook up the physics
for a flocking system. Reynold's boids model is a masterful demonstration in
how to intuitively understand class behavior.

My boss once asked me if we would ever be able to compute the complex behavior
of bird swarms. I immediately flipped around and said yes, one day in the
distant future of 1986. A bit snarky. I regretted it immediately. He just
expressed disappointment by how simple it ended up being. I explained that its
just a model of understanding and elegant for it, real life behavior is a lot
more chaotic and nuanced than this toy. In 2D it runs pretty well, and it's a
decent stress test on GPUs if you can also generalize the structure to take
advantage of 3D engines.

Here's a link to Daniel Shiffman's excellent write up and code examples
illustrating the phenomena:
[https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-
agents/](https://natureofcode.com/book/chapter-6-autonomous-agents/)

Another interesting take on swarming behavior is the study of convexity in the
generalized raptor problem. The discrete version of this problem is a kind of
flavor of the N-Queens problem. Basically you're solving for an ODE so the
police on all sides can't get you.

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roenxi
> Dear Hacker News, if you really want to make a difference on the ground...

At risk of being cynical, dear Hacker News - avoid protests and think about
how to be effective if you want to get involved in politics. I can count on
not very many fingers how many times I've seen protests accomplish anything
useful.

Protests, as a political tool, are for minority opinions to keep themselves in
the spotlight using tactics a little bit like a pufferfish. If an opinion has
the numbers there are much more effective political routes to take.

Political success, ultimately, comes from persuading neutral parties to
support a cause or even at a pinch political opponents to become neutrals.
Waving placards and chanting doesn't actually do either of those things
effectively. Door-knocking and pamphlet distribution is more effective and
more sustainable.

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082349872349872
Protests worked pretty well in the baltic states (and other former soviet
places) for changing entire economic systems, peacefully.

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literallycancer
And didn't work so well in 56 and 68. It only worked for the Baltics and the
rest in 89/90 because the Soviet Union was already falling apart, thanks to
mismanagement of the economy.

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Theodores
Police have institutional memory. For example a demo in Trafalgar Square. For
more than a century the authorities have known how to control that space.

If their masters want a riot in order to discredit the protest then that can
be arranged. If they want the protest to be a damp squib then that can be
arranged.

The protest will be made up of participants that were not there twenty years
ago. They are newbies. They will behave predictably.

I suggest the author look to the history of protest rather than Africa's Rift
Valley.

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082349872349872
yes (comparing bos taurus with homo sapiens):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23625491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23625491)

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xkcd-sucks
Philosophically: Yes

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sn41
I am not sure whether every flock is a swarm.

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lo_fye
We are animals, so I’d guess yes.

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pinkskin
Some of therm do,and some of them are. They should stop calling them protest
and call them what they are.

