The following two topics are likely to be discussed.
A) Modelling the collective behaviour of chicken
flocks. Marian Dawkins has a joint project with Steve Roberts in Engineering studying the patterns of optical flow in large flocks of commercial
broiler chickens. They have found that various measurements of flow (such as skew
and kurtosis) are predictive of future mortality. Marian would be interested in
seeing whether we can model these effects.
B) Asymmetrical prisoners’ dilemma games. Despite massive theoretical interest,
there are very few (if any) actual examples of animals showing the predicted
behaviour of reciprocity with delayed reward. Marian Dawkins suspects that the reason for
this is that the assumptions made are unrealistic and she would like to explore
some ideas about this.
Please note the slightly early start to accommodate the OCCAM group meeting that follows.