What can robots learn from fish?

Imagine a school of tiny zebrafish swimming in perfect synchrony, with no apparent leader. Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany set out to discover how the fish do it. In a new study, they used a virtual reality system to place the young zebrafish in a shared, networked “matrix.” Each fish could swim alongside the others, including the school leaders and “holographic” companions who were essentially virtual projections of the beha…