Crowd Behavior and Fractals
 

 



  • Physicist and software engineeer Keith Still made a surprising discovery during his observations on large crowds at Wembley Stadium in London, England: a crowd's movements can not only be predicted, but it can be modelled by fractals.
  • Still looked at video footage of the crowds and found (not surprisingly) that when someone's line of sight is obscured, they tend to follow other people in the rough direction they want to go, rather than trying to shove through a big mass of people to go in the specific direction they want to go.
  • These observations were reduced to an algorithm. Still then used a computer grid (with points representing people). "The results were astonishing. Beautiful patterns, which Still christened "Orchids", suddenly grew and bloomed like flowers on the computer screen. "We were amazed that three lines of code could produce such a complexity," he marvels."(1)


    References:

    (1)Crowd Dymanics

     

     

     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
                                                                                                              
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