A fleet of many ships, like a galaxy of stars, carries out a common mission. Sometimes a ship explodes, like a supernova. If not replaced in time, the fleet weakens. But the trouble is we can't see which ship will fail next — failures are invisible, like dark matter. Their accumulation leads to disorder, entropy. It's crucial to get ahead of chaos.

The usual method — the standard model of scheduled repair — doesn't account for randomness. The new algorithm makes each ship anticipate its neighbors' moves and independently decide when to repair. The fleet gets by without a captain: the decision emerges from interaction. Tests showed: for a squadron of 70 ships, costs are a quarter lower than with old approaches.