11/6/2023 0 Comments Extreme thing mosh pitsFinally, the team added a certain amount of statistical noise to the simulated moshers’ movements – “to mimic the effects of the inebriants that the participants typically use”, says co-author Matthew Bierbaum. ![]() To investigate, the team simulated a mosh pit with a few basic rules: the virtual moshers bounce off each other when they collide (instead of sticking or sliding through each other) they can move independently and they can flock, or follow each other, to varying degrees. ![]() What makes a crowd of people with independent decision-making powers behave like a random gas? “This presented a bit of a mystery,” Silverberg says. Such particles move around freely, interacting only when they bounce off one another. They found that the dancers’ speeds had the same statistical distribution as the speeds of particles in a gas. Together with another grad student and two physics professors at Cornell, he pulled videos of mosh pits off YouTube and used software developed for analysing particles in a fluid to track the moshers’ motions. Silverberg wondered if the mathematical laws that describe group behaviour in flocks of birds or schools of fish could apply to moshers as well. Metal fans’ favoured dance style is called moshing and mostly involves bodies slamming into each other. “I’m usually in the mosh pit, but for the first time I was off to the side and watching. “I didn’t want to put her in harm’s way, so we stood off to the side,” he says. ![]() But when Jesse Silverberg, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, took his girlfriend to her first heavy metal concert a few years ago, he witnessed a different and surprising form of crowd behaviour. Research into how humans behave in crowds had mostly been limited to fairly organised situations, like pedestrians forming lanes when walking on the street.
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