Abstract
Social interaction increases significantly the performance of a wide range of cooperative systems. However, evidence that natural swarms limit the number of interactions suggests potentially detrimental consequences of excessive interaction. Using a canonical model of collective motion, we find that the collective response to a dynamic localized perturbation–emulating a predator attack–is hindered when the number of interacting neighbors exceeds a certain threshold. Specifically, the effectiveness in avoiding the predator is enhanced by large integrated correlations, which are known to peak at a given level of interagent interaction. From the network-theoretic perspective, we uncover the same interplay between number of connections and effectiveness in group-level response for two distinct decision-making models of distributed consensus operating over a range of static networks. The effect of the number of connections on the collective response critically depends on the dynamics of the perturbation. While adding more connections improves the response to slow perturbations, the opposite is true for fast ones. These results have far-reaching implications for the design of artificial swarms or interaction networks.
Highlights
Social interaction is critical for swarms to perform an effective and coordinated response to changing environments
We follow the framework developed by Attanasi et al.[7, 8] and compute the connected correlation in velocity fluctuations C(r) (Eq (6)) for a swarm composed of N = 2,048 self-propelled particles (SPP) while varying the number of neighbors k
We find that a collective of SPPs following the Vicsek model in the ordered phase can exhibit a large integrated correlation if the number of neighbors k is set to an appropriate level (Fig. 1(b))
Summary
Social interaction is critical for swarms to perform an effective and coordinated response to changing environments. Gordon et al.[22] have shown that one species of ants (L. fuliginosus) regulate its rate of social encounters following: (i) changes in the nestmate density for undisturbed ant colonies, and (ii) the introduction of an external perturbation–workers from another colony–in the colony This limited interaction appears to be a behavioral feature and not a direct result of physical limitations of their sensing capabilities. The observed collective dynamics of midges[8] provides experimental evidence that this swarm tunes the amount of interaction–inferred from density–in a way that maximizes correlations This critical behavior may help explain why different social organisms seem to self-limit the number of connections, assuming that large integrated correlations do enhance the collective response for the benefit of biological functions such as predator avoidance or foraging. It is well known that these www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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