Anticipation breeds alignment (Q2662024)

The authors study the effects of anticipation (for positions or increments) in the large-time behavior for systems driven by radial potentials. This is done in a general framework, including the Cucker-Smale model for alignment with pairwise interactions. The anticipation-driven systems under considerations are expected to emerge into flocking (by alignment of velocities) and spatial concentration (for confining potentials). These occurrences are stated and proven in various situations. After introducing the concept of ``anticipated energy'' by means of the so-called enstrophy of the system -- a quantity derived as a sort of arithmetic mean of the velocities -- the authors consider the dynamics of \(N\)-body pairwise interactions, encoding the anticipation by means of \(N\) agents with anticipated energy and provide a priori upper bounds for the confining potentials. They describe in this case the decisive role of anticipation in the emergent structure, under appropriate assumptions. After that they study more general systems for two classes of bounded potentials (convex and attractive) and model the anticipation dynamics with attractive-repulsive potentials. They finally discuss the role of local and global weighted means, to be then used for proving the hypocoercivity of the discrete anticipation dynamics.