[janzer]

Just a clarifying note, Craig Reynolds is the original researcher for Boids, and he did have a Java applet implementation in the above page. But the original Boids simulation was from 1986, almost a decade prior to Java applets.

The original paper, published in 1987, is "Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model"[1]. The implementation was done in Lisp on a Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine.

Edit: One quite interesting paragraph from the paper regarding performance:

The boid software has not been optimized for speed. But this report would be incomplete without a rough estimate of the actual performance of the system. With a flock of 80 boids, using the naive O(N²) algorithm (and so 6400 individual boid-to-boid comparisons), on a single Lisp Machine without any special hardware accelerators, the simulation ran for about 95 seconds per frame. A ten-second (300 frame) motion test took about eight hours of real time to produce.

Once again, amazing how far hardware has advanced.

1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37402.37406

[monster_truck]

I've had a lot of fun playing with BBC Microbot (https://bbcmic.ro/). If you add &experimental=true to the URL it will add a rocket ship button underneath the display. Clicking it sends the code off to beebjit and runs it for 10,000 seconds instantly, allowing you to do unreasonable things such as this: https://bbcmic.ro/?t=bC9Go (not mine)