Predatory Swarm AI. Boid's Algorithm (Reynolds 1987) is the classical method for modeling the movement of animals in flocks or swarms. In it, each each bird-oid (boid) actor makes choices about how to move based on the movement of surrounding boids. In this report, I show that Boid's Algorithm can be extended to describe short-term predator-prey dynamics, where one or both of the groups (predator and prey) behave as flocks or swarms. Swarm-predator, swarm-prey behavior is most notably seen in sharks and schools of fish (shoiks and foish) and flocks of birds and flocks of insects.
In the Great British Baking Show, contestants often do not leave enough time for their cakes to cool before frosting them, which leads to messy melted frosting. In this project, I analyze the thermodynamics involved in cooling a cake in a freezer vs. in the open air. The general idea is if a cake is placed in a freezer immediately after leaving the oven, that cake will warm up the freezer despite the cooling capacity of the freezer (assuming that the freezer isn't incredibly powerful). This means that there could be a period of time where the inside of the freezer is warmer than the ambient temperature outside of the freezer due to the cake. Instead of placing the cake in the freezer immediately after the baking is done, the baker can leave the cake to cool in the open air for a few minutes.
Twitter contains massive amounts of social data. By analyzing the hashtags people use, we can place users into hashtag communities. After constructing a bipartite network of users and the hashtags they use, we perform a unipartite projection onto the hashtag set, giving us a network of hashtags that are connected if a user used both of them. Then, by using the Louvain Method for community detection, we can find communities of hashtags that are related in some meaningful way.
