Below is the last version of boids I used before I made the decision to give up on them completely and begin to program from scratch a set of rules for pairs of coloured circles to obey. I just found the boids object to be too chaotic. No matter how I calibrated it, the results looked like flocking insects or animals (not surprisingly) but not like a model of human behaviour in a milonga. Back to the drawing board. Not entirely wasted though, I took forward a couple of nifty equations worked out for calculating distances between two objects in a 2D space – the expression: expr sqrt((($f1-$f2)*($f1-$f2))+(($f3-$f4)*($f3-$f4))) is based on the trig equation: a squared + b squared = c squared, to give the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle. (dredged that one up from the recess of my GCSE maths mind. Never thought it would be useful again at the time!). Also the expression: expr (($f2-$f1)/2)+$f1 to find the coordinate midway between two other coordinates on one axis. this is the point about which the pair of dots orbit. actually, I could vary this value so that they don’t always orbit about their combined centre. Hmm. must do that tomorrow.

Anyway, the version shown in this screen grab had five pairs of boids, each pair had an attract point governed by the position of one of the five boids in the boid6 object. The 6th boid of boid6 would have been invisible, a space for the real dancing couple. This one was intended to keep the other couple representations away from the real couple.