BEHAVIORAL CLONING

Controlling a complex dynamic system such as a plane or a crane usually requires a skilled operator. Such a control skill is typically hard to reconstruct through introspection. Therefore an attractive approach to the reconstruction of control skill involves machine learning from operators control traces also known as behavioral cloning. Behavioral cloning is a method by which a machine learns control skills through observing what a human controller would do in a certain set of circumstances. It seeks to build a robust and explainable model by learning from the traces of a skilled operators behavior.

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Boids

Boids, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, is an artificial life program, simulating the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. The name refers to a "bird-like object", but its pronunciation evokes that of "bird" in a stereotypical New York accent.

As with most artificial life simulations, Boids is an example of emergent behavior; that is, the complexity of Boids arises from the interaction of individual agents (the boids, in this case) adhering to a set of simple rules. The rules applied in the simplest Boids world are as follows:
separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
cohesion: steer to move toward the average position of local flockmates

More complex rules can be added, such as obstacle avoidance and goal seeking.

The movement of Boids can be characterized as either chaotic (splitting groups and wild behaviour) or orderly. Unexpected behaviours, such as splitting flocks and reuniting after avoiding obstacles, can be considered emergent.

The boids framework is often used in computer graphics, providing realistic-looking representations of flocks of birds and other creatures, such as schools of fish or herds of animals.

Boids work in a manner similar to cellular automata, since each boid "acts" autonomously and references a neighbourhood, as do cellular automata.