Or are you asserting some sort of intelligence is behind it, so it is qualitatively different?

Sounds a little hand-wavy to me. We’ve been discovering for years that so many complex biological behaviors are also exhibited by mechanical systems. Which makes us ask how much intelligent behavior is actually behind those “complex” behaviors, and how much they are emergent patterns.

As someone pointed out above — everything is constrained. Birds are constrained by topography, wind currents, weather predator avoidance, food-seeking, etc. Flocking may be nothing more than a combination of these behaviors, or it might be something more. For a long time, we all thought it was obviously something more, a gray-matter, hand-wavy brain making some sort of bird-brain decisions.

But it might not be.

Same thing for us. Laughing at cat videos could be a sign of high intelligence, or it could be an emergent behavior from a complex, but mechanically and chemically-determined system.

OR it could be a sign that something can do an awful lot of complex things, and not require awareness or intelligence. And might even be better at it than we are.

—–

EDIT: Chris Palmer, below, sums it up much better than I did.

As for the confinement argument, yeah that’s valid, but organic clusters experience all kinds of natural barriers and influences. Flocks of birds/fish/cars might be influenced by any number of air/water currents, traffic controls, danger avoidance, food or sex drive, you name it. We’re animals after all, and not free radicals drifting in a void.

So one could say we’re teleologically driven individuals, with like needs in groups, affected by similar motives and constraints, resulting in movement patterns which resemble sensory interconnectedness, but might be better described as mechanical boundary response. That’s what I say, anyways.

In this experiment, the constrained environment is substituted for the “stay close together” motivation and the physical touching is substituted for the “don’t get too close” motivation. So while this result may not seem earth shattering, it is an interesting physical model of complex group behaviors in extremely “dumb” individual agents.

The Harvard video uses images of flocks to motivate the work, but this is not flocking behaviour as Dan correctly points out below, along with pauxide above. The authors must know this, and I think it’s rather dodgy to draw the comparison. They could have used images of animals all packed into a circle which would be more analogous, but they chose not to.  It’s also rather surprising where they chose to publish the results, since there is a journal of Swarm Intelligence which would be the natural home for this stuff, edited by people who know the field very well. 

The work is fine, don’t get me wrong. The analysis in the paper is very good. But the presentation and venue are…. odd.

(credentials: I’m the guy in the box-pushing video I linked above).

However, did they need to make the video so damn serious? The piano music and slow talk-over? It’s an interesting thing — make it interesting! If you didn’t listen to the content, you’d assume it was some heart-wrenching documentary about beggar children selling their feet for food.

It’s an interesting demonstration of a previously unknown phenomena. I’m sure there’s some mathematician out there who’s seen this and is already trying to come up with a formula or algorithm to describe the  behavior. If that ends up happening, then the experiment was certainly useful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_kZmatqAaQ