Don’t try to program the behaviour of a whole flock, as an earlier generation of computer programmers might have done. Instead, clone the single computer starling you have programmed. Make a thousand copies of your robo-bird, maybe all the same as each other, or maybe with some slight random variation among them in their rules. And now ‘release’ thousands of model starlings in your computer, so they are free to interact with each other, all obeying the same rules.
