Ants can save you from future traffic jams
Ants tactics could be applied to car driving cars in the future to avoid traffic jams

Fabio Biase / Getty Images
From a plane, cars that crawl cars are ants. But unlike real ants-cars, somehow avoid Stop and go traffic discharge. Researchers are studying these tactics of cooperative insects, learn how to program cars do not make jams.
The flow of free traffic becomes unstable as car density increases in a highway. In 15 vehicles per kilometer, a driver that touches the brakes can cause a permanent wave of accumulation. “It’s a kind of transition phase,” Katsuhiro Nishinari said, a mathematical physicist at Tokyo, who studies these transitions.
Nishinari’s previous studies demonstrated that the ants can keep food in large densities. So what is their secret? In a recent published study at Interdisciplinary views of transport research, Researchers were recorded Ochetellus Ants used to study the above and use traffic engineering models. The ants did not marry that almost the rates found constantly moving because the rates are constantly moving, while others maintain good distances, and they do not live to spend others.
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Hurry-hour human drivers almost do not follow such rules. “We are maximizing the interests of individuals, at a certain point, you start to become a traffic jam,” says Nicola Pugno Nicola Pugno learns lasting engineering at the University of Trento. Car driving cars, but if one day becomes ubiquitous, there could be more cooperative programming. In a single perspective of this future, the autonomous vehicles would share information with the surrounding cars, perhaps researchers suggest, constant speed and leading heads first and on the other.
This vehicle network would be similar to ants, the smell of behavior that interacts with each other while interacting with each other. “There is no leader”, but this organization is created anyway, I’m going to Pinter-Wollman, now ants learning ants at the University of California, in Los Angeles. And in the traffic of ants and vehicles, this type of distributed system can be “very strong” and resilient, as Nishinari says. (Nishinari and Pinter Wollman participated in new research.)
However, the ants can also do a lot of things that car drivers can do, Pinter-Wollman noted. Ants can be as wide as they want, unlike drivers attached to highways. Insects are sometimes done when they are sometimes limited in tunnels, but when things are not moving, “they will find a way to walk on the ceiling,” he explains. Also, unlike cars, ants do not fail; They can literally walk above each other.
Today’s drivers can learn at least one thing to avoid a traffic jam, Nishinari said: Don’t be able to work. Leaving the rooms between the car and the drivers, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in compact traffic conditions, otherwise the “phantom” would be amplified in full full-traffic doll. “Simply ignore,” he says, the flow of traffic can help well.