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Cornell
graduate student Jesse Silverberg observed mosh pit activity at a heavy
metal concert, and was inspired to study the movements of the dancers.
Those movements turned out to be a lot like how gas particles move.
To
investigate, the team simulated a mosh pit with a few basic rules: the
virtual moshers bounce off each other when they collide (instead of
sticking or sliding through each other); they can move independently;
and they can flock, or follow each other, to varying degrees. Finally,
the team added a certain amount of statistical noise to the simulated
moshers' movements – "to mimic the effects of the inebriants that the
participants typically use", says co-author Matthew Bierbaum.
They
found that by tweaking their model parameters – decreasing noise or
increasing the tendency to flock, for instance – they could make the pit
shift between the random-gas-like moshing and a circular vortex called a
circle pit, which is exactly what they saw in the YouTube videos of
real mosh pits. Their simulation is available online.
"These are
collective behaviours that you wouldn't have predicted based on the
previous literature on collective motion in humans," Silverberg says.
"That work was geared at pedestrians, but what we're seeing is
fundamentally different."
"The fact that human beings are very
complex creatures, and yet we can develop a lifeless computer simulation
that mimics their behaviour, really tells us that we're understanding
something new about the behaviour of crowds that we didn't understand
before," says co-author James Sethna.
Read more about the research at
New Scientist.
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