Overestimating Ants

Robert points out this inadvertently hilarious article on the topic of what drivers can learn from ants.

Now collective intelligence expert Dr Dirk Helbing says understanding more about ants could help solve one of the banes of modern life - road congestion.

His team set up an "ant motorway" with two routes of different widths from the nest to some sugar syrup. Soon the narrower route soon became congested.

But when an ant returning along the congested route to the nest collided with another ant just starting out, the returning ant pushed the newcomer onto the other path.

However, if the returning ant had enjoyed a trouble-free journey it did not redirect the newcomer.

The result was that just before the shortest route became clogged the ants were diverted to another route and traffic jams never formed.

He notes: "The reason the ants were able to inform each other about congestion, and use that information to reroute traffic, is not because the oncoming ants ‘told’ the others about it, it is because, in their experiment, the network already had enough spare capacity to handle the traffic. Humans are perfectly capable of reaching this same equilibrium. In fact, we have – that is what “Loop” highways and bypasses are for. The problem humans have is that spare road capacity is rather expensive, and is an explicit, and socialized, cost, while traffic jams have an only the implicit cost which falls on the private commuter, and so our roads have insufficient capacity. “Knowing” the traffic is bad going into downtown Austin on I-35 doesn’t provide me with a useful alternative route."

I would like to point out that human beings do not have any problem avoiding obstacles and finding alternative routes either... on foot. We simply go around. This is not something that can do in cars, traveling at high speed, on dedicated lanes where there is noplace else to go. If another road is not there, knowing that the route is backed up, once you are already on it, isn't very helpful. Another major source of traffic problems, aside from general congestion caused by overall insufficient road capacity, are accidents, and those are sudden events that screw up everyone who is already committed to driving on that road. I do not know of any way of "bumping" somebody who is between two exits on I-35 all the way over to MoPac.

I mean, shit, why screw around? I advise that we learn from the crows. When the road is backed up, just fly, okay? Actually, "as the crow flies" is basically always the shorter driving route anyway. Just shows how stupid we are. And ants, when you come down to it.

You know, this research about ants was pretty interesting; why the need to make it "relevant" to humanity's problems?