JohnyDL
commented
6 years ago I remember hearing/reading a long time ago about firefly flashes having this weird thing that might also be cool to encode, fireflies take a little bit of time to recharge their flash and generally flash in cycles that match that but if they are at a high charge level and see a flash they'll flash early as a reaction, the bigger the flash they see the less their internal battery needs to be charged to react and flash too.
The light could be encoded like the water waves we've seen before Different fireflies could have different charge times ranging from 1.9 to 2.1 seconds and different reaction times ranging from 1 to 3 frames When the pixel a fire fly sits on lights up for every unit of light (up to 10 units) reduces the charge level to be allowed to flash by 1%
Close fireflies might start to almost sync up fairly quickly for spotted patterns in the chaos or a whole bunch firing together on one side of the screen might trigger some on the other side to flash as a reply. The slowest recharging fire flies should desync with the fastest because they're just over 10% longer to recharge and they won't quite get the bump so they could cause unusual emergent patterns in the flashes.
The reason this stuck in my head is this video https://youtu.be/aSNrKS-sCE0 there's a part at the beginning synchronicity demonstrated through clapping, it starts with everyone clapping and because everyone has a natural clapping speed it starts off random, then they are told to clap together, I figure the way each individual manages it is if they heard a particularly strong clap when they were almost ready attempt to join it, the whole hall started clapping in unison and slowly the clapping sped up as an emergent property and broke out into randomness when some couldn't keep up it was quite surreal. But later in the video the guy talks about fireflies and explains some of that flashing mechanism in the same terms.
firefly algorithm is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_algorithm