Fish and Chips

A book investigating the role of fish schools at the intersection of biology and computer science can hardly refrain from using the subtitle ‘Fish and Chips.’ Although fish-school research has done much, as we have seen, to assist the fishing industry, I am less interested in British comfort food here than I am in the operative and performative function of agent-based computer simulations of schools. Whereas the previous two chapters dealt with the ‘fishy business’ of experimental and empirical studies, their optical and acoustic methods of observation, and their physico-mathematical modeling – over the course of which the ‘naturalness’ of fish schools was gradually subtracted and replaced by sets of functional principles – the aim of the present chapter is to elucidate the final stages of this subtraction. In addition to fulfilling this aim, however, I will also have to focus on a historiographical and epistemological recursion that marked a transformation in our knowledge of swarm collectives: against the backdrop of an epistemology of computer simulation, a biologization of computer science coincided with a computerization of (swarm) biology.

In what follows, I intend to examine the liminal area between fish and chips, within which biology and computer science overlap. The technology of computer simulation expands the realm of addressable problems by increasing the applicability of quantitative analyses. Simulations treat multiple variables simultaneously and make them manageable in time. In real time, that is, they directly address the behavior of complex systems without needing to be based on any specific reference to empirical data.