Phil,
I now see where 'accumulated variance' is used in the context of Principal
Components Analysis where it represents how much of the variance is explained by
a set of component vectors. Is this how you're using the term?
Given this usage, I would guess that if you described the agents'
Phil,Following on from Steve's comments, the mean distance of a randomly-walking point from its origin is of the order sqrt(N) where N is the number of steps in its walk. Steve's flocks don't exhibit this behaviour, so it's safe to say that no, swarms do not generally display random walk
That sqrt(N) estimate depends on the assumption of
random walk in non-random environment, doesn't it? These kinds of estimates
change a lot in a random environments? I don't have the time to check this, but
this should be presented in detail in existing books. For example, see the
