Wildebeest herds on rolling hills: Flocking on arbitrary curved surfaces
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The collective behavior of active agents, whether herds of wildebeest or microscopic actin filaments propelled by molecular motors, is an exciting frontier in biological and soft matter physics. Almost three decades ago, Toner and Tu developed a continuum theory of the collective action of flocks, or herds, that helped launch the modern field of active matter. One challenge faced when applying continuum active matter theories to living phenomena is the complex geometric structure of biological environments. Both macroscopic and microscopic herds move on asymmetric curved surfaces, like undulating grass plains or the surface layers of cells or embryos, which can render problems analytically intractable. In this paper, we present a formulation of the Toner-Tu flocking theory that uses the finite element method to solve the governing equations on arbitrary curved surfaces. First, we test the developed formalism and its numerical implementation in channel flow with scattering obstacles and on cylindrical and spherical surfaces, comparing our results to analytical solutions. We then progress to surfaces with arbitrary curvature, moving beyond previously accessible problems to explore herding behavior on a variety of landscapes. This approach allows the investigation of transients and dynamic solutions not revealed by analytic methods. It also enables versatile incorporation of new geometries and boundary conditions and efficient sweeps of parameter space. Looking forward, the paper presented here lays the groundwork for a dialogue between Toner-Tu theory and data on collective motion in biologically relevant geometries, from drone footage of migrating animal herds to movies of microscopic cytoskeletal flows within cells.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it