Can Ants Solve Traffic Jams?
I was among the researchers consulted for the production of this Slate video...
From know-what to know-where
One measure of people's knowledge is the amount of information that a person can come up with. In the "old" days, this information would come mainly out of your head. From experience, you can know what things are, e.g. facts, dates, etc. With a good memory , you can reproduce much learned information. Add reasoning , and you can combine your experiences to produce novel information and know how things work. Thus, people will have more knowledge if they are able to store and manipulate information. This was the game humankind played... until a decade ago. Blame it on Google . What is the use of memorizing information when you can find it in an instant? Before you had to go to a library to search for information, so it was a big advantage to have a good memory. Now remembering and reasoning are not enough. You need to know where to find information. Certainly, this does not displace reasoning, only encyclopedic memory. The thing is that having such an accessible inform...
Comments
BTW, I also study the traffic jam.
:)
Very nice video which explains clearly how we can learn from ants how to solve congestion problems.
We are currently developing a traffic information system based on a similar concept in Jakarta, Indonesia, where each car tells other cars on the roads the condition on the road it's on, effectively signaling other cars to avoid jams or to choose routes that are free.
Our project was inspired by the "group intelligent" concept from the book "Prey" by Michael Crichton.
Thank you very much for the video.
I hope we can get a chance to talk to you one of these days...
Regards,
Dien.
www.biolocate.com
I checked Fire Ants and it looks very interesting. Please keep me updated with it.
I used a similar idea to regulate traffic lights, see Chapter 5 of:
http://complexes.blogspot.com/2007/10/new-ebook-design-and-control-of-self.html
Cheers,
Carlos