[HN Gopher] The Magic of Herding
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       The Magic of Herding
        
       Author : dnetesn
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2025-08-06 10:39 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nautil.us)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | The key insight: _" The dogs could simply wait until the sheep
       | were facing in the direction they wanted before closing in"._
       | 
       | This is standard herding procedure. Head them up in the desired
       | direction, then move them out.[1]
       | 
       | Sheep are so herd-bound that once the front of the herd is going
       | in the desired direction, the rest will bunch up and follow. Even
       | through a narrow gate. There's been millennia of selective
       | breeding for that. Cattle are not as herd-bound. Horses even less
       | so.
       | 
       | [1] https://smallfarmersjournal.com/cattle-handling-
       | part-1-basic...
        
       | EA-3167 wrote:
       | Cute dogs, interesting dynamics with chaotic elements, physics,
       | and did I mention the cute dogs?
       | 
       | > Raissa D'Souza, a professor of computer science and engineering
       | at the University of California, Davis, praised the scientists'
       | clever use of real world data and agreed that the findings could
       | be useful in the context of robot swarms, particularly for search
       | and rescue. But she pointed out that the results only apply to a
       | very specific type of physics problem--small noisy systems that
       | feature random switching between two states--and don't generalize
       | over all examples of small, noisy collectives.
       | 
       | So how would this apply to drones tracking small groups of
       | soldiers, or tracking AI-driven drone "flocks"?
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-09 23:01 UTC)