# Autonomous Agents & Steering

**Track:** Physics, Motion & Emergence — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Forces & Acceleration, Vectors: Magnitude & Direction

**In one line:** Motion that looks alive — an agent steers toward what it wants.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

An autonomous agent is a body that perceives a little of its world and steers itself—motion that reads as alive because desire, not a script, appears to drive it. Craig Reynolds formalized this in 1987 with Boids, where flocking emerges from three local rules—separation, alignment, cohesion—applied by each bird with no leader and no global plan. His later steering behaviors cast seeking, fleeing, and arriving as a force: the difference between desired and current velocity. The aesthetic is uncanny vitality—murmurations, schools, swarms—order arising from the bottom up. Daniel Shiffman devotes a central chapter to it, treating lifelike movement as an achievable, mechanical thing.