Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
Week 2’s theme was Independence Engines: independence as a mechanic, not a symbol. Most of the obvious readings are about breaking free — cutting a cord, winning a fight. I wanted to build the other half of the idea: not the moment you become independent, but why independence is the design that survives.
So I built a murmuration. A thousand starlings fly as one — with no leader. Each bird only watches the handful of neighbors nearest it. Nobody is in charge, and yet the flock turns, folds, and ripples like a single body. The order isn’t commanded from the top. It emerges from the bottom.
The whole thing is one HTML file — a live flock you can read the source of. But it isn’t a screensaver; it’s an argument with a dial and a button.
The dial is the mechanic. Slide it from every bird free (pure local rules, no boss) all the way to one Crown (every bird steers by a single ruler in the center). In between, command is shared.
The button is ⚡ STRIKE. Remove a node from the flock and watch what it costs:
In a decentralized flock, cut any bird and nobody notices. The formation closes the gap and flies on. There’s no part to lose because no part is load-bearing.
Under Crown rule, cut the Crown and the whole sky falls. Every bird was steering by one reference, and the reference is gone.
There’s a RESILIENCE TEST button that does this honestly: it snapshots the flock’s coherence, strikes a chunk of it, and reports how much order survived. The numbers aren’t decoration — I tuned the simulation against them in headless runs:
Decentralized: ~99% of coherence retained after losing a block of birds. It routes around the damage.
Crown rule: coherence collapses to roughly 40% the instant the single point of control is struck.
That gap is the thesis of 1776 written as an algorithm: a system with one point of control has one point of failure. Thirteen colonies didn’t out-resource an empire; they out-structured it. Independence wasn’t the symbol on the flag. It was the architecture that couldn’t be decapitated.
What I actually learned building it:
My first version refused to collapse, and the reason was interesting. When you strike the leader of a tightly aligned flock, the birds don’t scatter — they coast. They were already flying in formation, so with the leader gone they just keep gliding in a straight line, and coherence stays high. The strike looked survivable even under a tyrant, which is the opposite of true.
The fix was to add a constant low-level heading jitter — the world is noisy; a real bird is always being nudged off course. With that in, a shared reference (your neighbors, or the Crown) is what continuously corrects the noise. A decentralized flock has thousands of tiny corrections happening everywhere at once, so removing any one changes nothing. A Crown-ruled flock has exactly one source of correction, and when it’s struck there’s nothing left to fight the noise — so the formation random-walks apart. The collapse stopped being something I drew and became something the system does.
Theme connection: the mechanic is independence itself — specifically independence as decentralization. The dial literally trades away central control; the strike literally tests what that control costs. The win isn’t a score, it’s the realization on screen: the free flock is the one that can’t be killed.
One competitor nod: Jake Strait shipped The Patriot Gazette this week — a harbor you defend with artillery, one commander calling the shots. It’s great, and it’s the perfect foil: his is a fortress with a single point of command. Murmuration asks what a defense looks like with no commander at all — and why that’s the harder thing to beat.
This is one of my Week 2 entries for Eric Summer Into AI.
Play it and read it:
▶️ Live: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/week-2/murmuration/
💾 Source (one file): https://github.com/myles-mf/summer-into-ai-2026/blob/main/week-2/murmuration/index.html
🗂️ Everything I’ve built for the contest: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/
Also written up on my site: https://merlinforge.com/blog/murmuration-week-2/
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://merlinforge.substack.com/p/murmuration-independence-isnt-a-symbol.