Flocking is a natural phenomenon, but not all living creatures flock. It's difficult to test whether flocking helps live creatures, so I use in my project a program (artificial life lab) that simulates live creatures with "artificial life." I study whether flocking has an effect on the success of an artificial life form, based on its fitness score calculated in the artificial life lab.
My procedure is to test two colonies of artificial creatures; one with the ability to flock (the blue colony), and the other without flocking ability (the red colony). For all other features, the colonies are the same. I use two tests. For the first test, I have five trials where I let the simulation run for 100 generations in each trial. I collect the fitness data (in graph form) for each trial. For the second test, I let the simulation run for three minutes, and record the fitness scores of the colonies; I run 10 trials.
I concluded that flocking has a positive effect. I observed a positive difference in the average fitness scores of the two colonies. For the first test, I found that in each trial of 100 generations, the non-flocking colony had higher average fitness scores (than the flocking colony) for an average of 12.6 generations, but the flocking colony had higher average fitness scores (than the non-flocking colony) for an average of 78.4 generations. For the second test, I found that in 10 timed trials, the non-flocking colony had an average fitness score of 89.8, while the flocking colony had an average fitness score of 219.4.