[Swarm-Modelling] ABM in Nature

[Steve Railsback]

There's a strange feeling you get when people reproduce your work and 
publish it in a much more prestigious journal, without citing your 
paper...a combination of validation and violation.

The cover article of today's issue of Nature 
(http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html ) is a paper that addresses a 
very similar problem to the one that my colleagues and I addressed via a 
Swarm model: can a small number of "directed" individuals steer a school 
of fish that otherwise follows Boids-like behavior 
(http://www.humboldt.edu/~ecomodel/clupeoids.htm )?

Couzin et al. do a much more detailed analysis than we did, and have 
much nicer graphics. On the other hand, they acknowledge funding from at 
least six sources; our funding was zero, we did the software in 2 days 
(by modifying the Swarm version of Boids that Paul Johnson recently 
updated and posted), and our simulations were run on a laptop during a 
flight from the US to Norway.

It's also interesting that Couzin et al. seem to carefully avoid using 
the words "agent-based" or "individual-based model", even though that's 
what they used.

Steve Railsback

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