It was so fast a program, I imagined that it might handle larger populations rather well. I was not entirely correct. His program would not animate thousands of individuals with the speed I desired. However, there were a lot of changes that could be made to speed up the program. These changes had not been worth the trouble to Alex, because for the populations he was animating, the program ran extremely fast.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
There are MUCH faster machines that could probably animate Mega Flies with a population of more than 10,000 individuals smoothly. Perhaps you are wondering how amateur programmers like Alex and myself outdid all the other people who have written flocking programs in the past. Well, we didn't. Alex's program, Flies , cheats when determing the closest neighbors in the flock, and Mega Flies uses the same algorithm, entirely unaltered. I only sped up the efficiency of Flies , not the methodology itself.