June 4, 2026
Mufaro J. Machaya

The 'FInDS' library was written for my 2026 Summer Internship in Professor
Daniel Floryan's Fluid Dynamics lab at the University of Houston. It was
written to solve the problem of the unscalability of fish-like particles
simulations used to observe the group-behavior of fish-like particles
to understand the mechanics of fish swimming in schools, birds flying in
groups, drones/bugs flying in swarms, and so on.

This fundamentally follows the N-body problem, as each fish-like particle
(which I have equivalently called "fish automatons" and "autofish" in
various places) affects each other fish-like particle in the simulation.
At a group size of N=3, an analytical solution is no longer possible, and
numerical calculation is needed. As the group size N increases, the
computational complexity in performing these numerical calculations grows
as a function of N^2.

As such, the fundamental goal of 'Fish' was to simplify the calculations
to reduce the effect of this bottleneck on Floryan's research through the
implementation of approximation algorithms and speed tricks commonly used
in Particle dynamics, starting with the Barnes-Hut approximation, which
decreases the computational complexity to O(N log N).

By August 20 onward, future updates will be unlikely to continue to this
repository.

Thank you,
Mufaro J. Machaya