Jan

15

Boids, from Asindu Drileba

January 15, 2026 |

Their is a more interesting school of Artificial Intelligence branded as "Artificial Life" (AL). Their goal is mostly on how to simulate living things in nature, in contrast to Artificial Intelligence where the goal is to solve day today human problems (it doesn't matter to AI people if the solutions are not consistent with how nature actually does it, but for AL people it does).

An Artificial Life researcher at Nvidia in the 1980s came up with the idea of Boids. It was a very simple algorithm for the simulation of collective intelligence i.e schools of fish, flocks of birds, herds of herbivores. If you have watched The Lord of the Rings, the battle scenes are generated using boids.

One of the parameters of boids is "cohesion". Cohesion is the tendency of "boids" (individual entities in a flock) to move towards their "center of mass". Cohesion is computed by listing the individual coordinates of each "boid" and then finding their average.

In markets, the "current price" can be thought of as the "center of mass" or "cohesion", an "average" of offerings on the order books. Traders may prefer to place orders close to current prices to get filled faster.

When I trade manually and get filled, I am often tempted to close my position in event of small loss (away from the average). Or take profit in event of a small win (still away from the average). I feel like a "boid", and It seems like my need to undergo "cohesion" or chase the "center of mass".


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