← Blog

Murmuration — A Flock With No Leader vs. One Crown

Which is more resilient — a flock with no leader, or one with a single ruler? I built a live simulation to settle it.

A dense, coherent starling flock in mid-flight over a black sky, the coherence gauge reading 96% in DECENTRALIZED mode.

What it is

A live starling murmuration where order emerges from the bottom up: each bird only watches its neighbors, nobody’s in charge. A dial blends the system from every bird free to one Crown. Then you strike a node — cut a free bird and the flock routes around the loss; cut the Crown and the whole formation falls out of the sky.

How it’s built

  • Classic boids (separation / alignment / cohesion) with a tunable central-vs-local blend — local forces weighted (1−c)² so near-total Crown rule leaves no distributed correction.
  • Per-frame heading jitter that a shared reference (neighbors or Crown) can correct but a decapitated flock can’t — that’s the engine of the collapse.
  • Order parameter φ = |mean unit velocity|; verified headlessly: decentralized retains ~99% coherence after losses, Crown rule craters to ~40% once the leader is struck.
The flock in CROWN RULE mode at 100% coherence, with the gold Crown leader bird ringed by a halo.
Slide the dial to ONE CROWN and every bird steers by a single gold ruler.
The centralized flock breaking into scattered fragments after the Crown is struck, the readout reading “The Crown is down.”
Strike the Crown and the formation falls out of the sky — one point of control is one point of failure.

On the theme

1776 as an algorithm: a system with one point of control has one point of failure. Independence isn’t the symbol here — it’s the architecture that survives the strike.

Try it →Code →All the builds →

Shout-out

Part of the competition is cross-referencing other builders. So: shout-out to Jake Strait — one of the most prolific builders in the competition; worth a look.

Built for Summer Into AI 2026 (Competition #2), hosted by Eric Rhea. More in the build log.