Editing Flocking (section)

==Applications==
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In Cologne, Germany, two biologists from the University of Leeds demonstrated a flock-like behaviour in humans. The group of people exhibited a very similar behavioural pattern to that of a flock, where if 5% of the flock would change direction the others would follow suit. When one person was designated as a predator and everyone else was to avoid him, the flock behaved very much like a school of fish.<ref>"http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/02/15/herd-mentality-explained/1922.html {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141129010932/http://psychcentral.com/news/2008/02/15/herd-mentality-explained/1922.html |date=2014-11-29 }}". Retrieved on October 31st 2008.</ref>

Flocking has also been considered as a means of controlling the behaviour of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs).<ref>Senanayake, M., Senthooran, I., Barca, J. C., Chung, H., Kamruzzaman, J., & Murshed, M. [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.714.6323&rep=rep1&type=pdf "Search and tracking algorithms for swarms of robots: A survey."]</ref>

Flocking is a common technology in [[screensaver]]s, and has found its use in animation. Flocking has been used in many films<ref>{{cite thesis | last = Gabbai | first = J. M. E. | author-link = Jonathan Gabbai | title = Complexity and the Aerospace Industry: Understanding Emergence by Relating Structure to Performance using Multi-Agent Systems | year = 2005 | publisher = University of Manchester Doctoral Thesis | place = Manchester | url = http://www.gabbai.com/academic/complexity-and-the-aerospace-industry-understanding-emergence-by-relating-structure-to-performance-using-multi-agent-systems/ | access-date = 2007-02-21 | archive-date = 2014-12-19 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20141219110658/http://gabbai.com/academic/complexity-and-the-aerospace-industry-understanding-emergence-by-relating-structure-to-performance-using-multi-agent-systems | url-status = dead }}</ref> to generate crowds which move more realistically. 
[[Tim Burton]]'s ''[[Batman Returns]]'' (1992)  featured flocking bats.{{synthesis inline|date=March 2018}}

Flocking behaviour has been used for other interesting applications. It has been applied to automatically program Internet multi-channel radio stations.<ref>{{cite conference
| title         = DJ-boids: emergent collective behaviour as multichannel radio station programming
|vauthors = Ibanez J, Gomez-Skarmeta AF, Blat J | year          = 2003
| book-title     = Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
| pages         = 248–250
| doi           = 10.1145/604045.604089
}}</ref>
It has also been used for visualizing information<ref>{{cite conference
| title         = Time-Varying Data Visualization Using Information Flocking Boids
| author        = Moere A V
| year          = 2004
| book-title     = Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization
| pages         = 97–104
| doi           = 10.1109/INFVIS.2004.65
| url= http://vis.computer.org/vis2004/DVD/infovis/papers/moere.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://vis.computer.org/vis2004/DVD/infovis/papers/moere.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live
}}</ref>
and for optimization tasks.<ref>{{cite journal
|vauthors=Cui Z, Shi Z |title= Boid particle swarm optimisation 
|journal= International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications
|volume=2 |issue=2 |pages= 77–85
|year=2009
|doi= 10.1504/IJICA.2009.031778}}</ref>