How one single sheepdog herds a flock of one hundred – mystery solved b4in.org/r87p If you’ve ever been to farmlands and kept your eyes opened, you might have noticed not only how beautiful the simple life can be, but also how there’s no better illustration for the phrase “man’s best friend” than a shepherd and his sheepdog. The two are linked together by an ancestral bondage, one that transcended mere friendship – both man and dog depend on each other to make ends meet and put food on the table/bowl. How exactly one man and canine are able to herd whole flocks of mindless sheep over a hundred strong has always been boggling and more or less taken for granted. A new study sheds light on the matter. The result: in the future sheep might be guided by robot herders. Heck, why not? The math of sheep herding Researchers at Swansea University, UK and Uppsala University in Sweden built a mathematical model that explains how one single sheepdog can round up herds made of up to 100 sheep. Their conclusion suggests that the dog needs only to follow two simple mathematical rules. One causes a sheepdog to close any gaps it sees between dispersing sheep – in fact this is sort of where the key lies; the dog doesn’t see the sheep per se. The dog doesn’t distinguish the fluffy white balls in front of him as individual sheep and what it notices are only the gaps that form in an otherwise white sea. The other rule results in sheep being driven forward once the gaps are sufficiently closed. To reach this conclusion, the researchers fitted one dog and 46 sheep with a highly sensitive GPS device. They then fed the data in a computer simulation to devise the model that would explain what prompts the dog to move and how the animal responds. Lead researcher Dr Andrew King, from Swansea University, said: “If you watch sheepdogs rounding up sheep, the dog weaves back and forth behind the flock in exactly the way that we see in the model. “We had to think about what the dog could see to develop our model. It basically sees white, fluffy things in front of it. If the dog sees gaps between the sheep, or the gaps are getting bigger, the dog needs to bring them together.” More b4in.org/r87p
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 23:27:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015