Why Ants Are Practically Immune To Traffic Jams (sciencealert.com) 57
ScienceAlert reports on a new study published in the journal eLife that explains for the first time how ants are immune to traffic jams, even under crowded conditions. From the report: By cooperating in a self-organized system, researchers have found that Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) can adapt to different road conditions and prevent clogging from ever occurring. All it takes is a little selflessness and restraint - something we humans should maybe consider. Filming 170 repeat experiments, researchers observed how this particular species of ant moved along a bridge between their nest and a food source. The experiments included different widths of bridge (5 mm, 10 mm, and 20 mm), holding anywhere between 400 and 25,600 ants. Throughout the process, data was collected on traffic flow, the speed of the ants, and the number of collisions that occurred. What the authors found was surprising: these ants appeared to be immune to traffic jams.
"The exact nature of the mechanisms used by Argentine ants to keep the traffic flowing in this study remains elusive," they write, "yet when density on the trail increases, ants seemed to be able to assess crowding locally, and adjusted their speed accordingly to avoid any interruption of traffic flow." In fact, compared to humans, these ants could load up the bridge with twice the capacity without slowing down. When humans are walking or driving, the flow of traffic usually begins to slow when occupancy reaches 40 percent. Argentine ants, on the other hand, show no signs of slowing, even when the bridge occupancy reached 80 percent. And they do this through self-imposed speed regulation. When it's moderately busy, for instance, the authors found the ants actually speed up, accelerating until a maximum flow or capacity is reached. Whereas, when a trail is overcrowded, the ants restrained themselves and avoided joining until things thinned out. Plus, at high density times like this, the ants were found to change their behavior and slow down to avoid more time-wasting collisions.
"The exact nature of the mechanisms used by Argentine ants to keep the traffic flowing in this study remains elusive," they write, "yet when density on the trail increases, ants seemed to be able to assess crowding locally, and adjusted their speed accordingly to avoid any interruption of traffic flow." In fact, compared to humans, these ants could load up the bridge with twice the capacity without slowing down. When humans are walking or driving, the flow of traffic usually begins to slow when occupancy reaches 40 percent. Argentine ants, on the other hand, show no signs of slowing, even when the bridge occupancy reached 80 percent. And they do this through self-imposed speed regulation. When it's moderately busy, for instance, the authors found the ants actually speed up, accelerating until a maximum flow or capacity is reached. Whereas, when a trail is overcrowded, the ants restrained themselves and avoided joining until things thinned out. Plus, at high density times like this, the ants were found to change their behavior and slow down to avoid more time-wasting collisions.
Hire them! (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like we need to hire Argentine Ants to do city planning in the US.
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More seriously though, ant behavior has been used for this kind of thing before [harvard.edu].
Re: Hire them! (Score:1)
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By cooperating in a self-organized system [... dangling modifier removed...] ants can adapt to different road conditions and prevent clogging from ever occurring. All it takes is a little selflessness and restraint
This sounds like Communism, and you can't have that!
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Yeah, I'm unemployed. Hire me please. :P
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We need to employ them as drivers.
Then (Score:4, Insightful)
"The exact nature of the mechanisms used by Argentine ants to keep the traffic flowing in this study remains elusive,"
I guess it's not just self-restraint and unselfishness then?
Well yea, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Way back in ancient times there was some amusement car rides that did that. I've seen one b&w film/video of it but I never knew the origin...
It was a single-car track with slow-moving 4-passenger-sized cars, where the cars could roll up and over each other.
I've never seen anything else like it. Like, back around WW-2? Or maybe earlier? Shorpy? Anyone?
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No, of course it isn't. Ants can readily carry six times their own weight, they walk in 3D, 6 ants piled on the one below, they walk over each other and think of a moving walkway made of 6 layers of ants. As the pile up at a jam, the ants on top walk on the ants below, think about it, the ants below do not stop moving, so the next layer of ants even when not ambulating are still moving at the pace of the ants below, but they are walking so they effectively move at double the speed of the ant below and on it
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And even if the ants on the bottom do stop moving, they're unlikely to be injured.
Ants don't have soft bodies, like a human or a car. (!)
different goals (Score:3)
when an ant trail started to clog, individuals returning to the nest blocked the leaving ants, forcing them to find a new route.
That's okay for an ant, because they are all anonymous drones working for the same goal. But my boss isn't going to be happy when I go do something else when the road is blocked with traffic.
Re:different goals (Score:5, Funny)
There we have the selfish attitude again.
Wonder if personal space is a factor (Score:3)
Putting it terms of occupancy (I assume standing still) makes me wonder. Has anyone done a study of crowds of humans walking in different societies? People who grew up in different countries have a different amount of personal space they're comfortable with [howstuffworks.com]. That is, they try to maintain at least that distance from other people. This traits of ants not slowing down in crowded situations may be as simple as having very tiny personal space.
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Yes, the study is often repeated at European soccer games. Without personal space, humans simply die in the congestion. Ants don't do that, so they don't need the space. It is about personal space, but not about preferences or what "they're comfortable with." It is about, what types of forces can their bodies survive?
Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
The main reason ants are immune to traffic jams is that they don't drive cars.
Next, they'll discover gorillas never misplace their wallet.
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Next, they'll discover gorillas never misplace their wallet.
Actually, I was at the Zoo just last week with no cash for a vending machine. I thought "I'll ask my relatively closely genetic relatives over here" but literally every single Gorilla had misplaced theirs.
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Ants (Score:3)
What was that again? (Score:2)
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What does a yellow light mean? - Taxi TV Series - clip [youtube.com]
Makes sense if you're driving a taxi, right?
Evolution (Score:2)
Ants are typically genetically much more closely tied to each other than random human drivers. Evolution "knows" this.
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Let's just hope we don't get a President like that.
Because they're cooperating (Score:4, Interesting)
Ants cooperate on the 'highway'. Humans loathe and compete with other humans on the highway
Plus, if two ants do touch, it's no big deal except both ants are required to say 'sorry bro, no homo' so they can be more aggressive. If two cars touch everything goes to hell so people have to slow down - except for that one testosterone poisoned bastard tailgating you and honking the horn even though all four lanes are packed and going 5mph.
So they "don't slow down" BY slowing down? (Score:2)
Great logic there, DrMr. JeckyllHide!
Maybe you should get your brain back to one single personality so you don't contradict yourself without even blinking.
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Slowing down a little at the right time can avoid having to slow down by a lot more later on.
Good point. (Score:2)
They aren't actually "not slowing down" then though.
Just not slowing down as much as we do.
All it takes ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is obeying the speed limit, keeping a proper distance between vehicles, using turn signals, allowing people to safely merge when a lane change really is needed, and not weaving in/out of lanes to âoeget there a little fasterâ. So, yeah...selflessness and self-control.
Everyday, I see the ducks who wait until the last possible moment to get over and merge onto the off ramp which Fâ(TM)d up trafffic in adjacent routes. Had the gotten over a 1/4-1 mile prior, traffic would flow and people wouldnâ(TM)t slam on their breaks which have a ripple effect.
And, for Fâ(TM)s sake, get off the phone and pay attention.
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Say it louder for those still on their phone.
Re:All it takes ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. When the traffic supply exceeds the capacity of the road, you're going to have a traffic jam.
There are two ways to improve capacity on a given road: drive faster, and drive closer together, but when you do that, you remove slack for unexpected events, and amplify instability.
keeping a proper distance between vehicles, using turn signals, allowing people to safely merge when a lane change really is needed
If you keep a minimal distance, nobody can merge. If you keep extra distance to allow merging, you're not utilizing full road capacity.
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Is obeying the speed limit,
Nope. If we obeyed the speed limits around e.g. the bay area, traffic would be backed up right onto the surface streets. The faster you go, the more vehicles can use the roadway in a given period of time, right up until there's a collision. So the highest throughput is enjoyed at the fastest speed which doesn't result in collisions. But the speed limits are designed to permit selective enforcement. They know we drive faster, and because they do studies on this sort of thing they know we have to drive faster
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Fuck that. This is properly written "not being in the wrong lane". If you're not passing, get out of the passing lane. Then nobody will be weaving. All civilized locations have laws prohibiting misusing the passing lane, regardless of speed and speed limit. But somehow it's the people weaving through traffic who get pulled over and cited, because they're allegedly selfish and dangerous. Why not cite the selfish people who create the dangerous conditions in the first place, by driving too slowly in the passing lane, reducing throughput, and thus increasing congestion?
If anybody cares here's a site that lists what the rules for the left lane are https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right... [mit.edu] Anyway pretty much on point. People are idiots and can't figure out what lane to be in even when the law is like my state(Mass) and it's actually simple. (Left lane is for passing or turning left) What's worse is there's other idiots who don't realize that on the highway you can legal pass on the right. So behind that one jackass going slowly in the left is 5-10 more idiots tailgating him and c
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If everybody tries to pass on the right, you'll lock in the congestion across both lanes and make it worse. It only seems like it works because enough people are doing the right thing and just crowding and honking at the person out of place.
Re:All it takes ... (Score:4, Insightful)
To drive safely, one should maintain a two second distance [wikipedia.org] between you and the vehicle in front of you. This means no more than 30 vehicles can safely use a lane in a minute, independent of vehicle speed. So increasing speeds does not in practice increase the road's capacity.
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Yeah, that would also shut down traffic hard if people actually did that. There is just not enough capacity for people to leave that much space. We need to bring back rail in a big way. There used to be a plethora of useful rail systems in the bay area before you know what. Most of them were even private, and yet still somehow both profitable and affordable.
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Make it into an Algorithm (Score:1)
Ok, then just post a paper distilling it into an algorithm, or set of algorithms, and we can then use it for advancing self-driving cars and robotic automation. Biomimicry is useful for engineering, but without someone realizing the potential, it's just knowledge for knowledge's sake.
Consider the costs (Score:3)
What is the cost if an ant maintains its speed and has an "accident?"
What is the cost if a human in an automobile maintains its speed and has an accident?
I think the extreme disparity in costs, even relative to our sizes, suggests humans are wise to slow down when they do. Perhaps these head in the cloud scientists should revisit reality, as infrequently as that is done on college campuses these days. When they do some possible explanations for odd phenomena sort of jump out and slap you in your facepalm.
{^_-}
By cooperating in a self-organized system, researc (Score:2)
By cooperating in a self-organized system, researchers have found that Argentine ants...
Reads like "Researchers have found, by cooperating in a self-organized system, that..." :)
Politicizing science (Score:1)
All it takes is a little selflessness and restraint - something we humans should maybe consider."
This kind of overtly politicized science is why people don't trust these kinds of conclusions. This is clearly the author's bias and scolding for the rest of us, and has no place in science. But the author just can't help herself. She has to show her commitment to collectivism in public. The absurdity of thinking humans should be more like mindless ants is not considered.
And if we did behave more like ants,
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The quote you're complaining about is NOT in the actual paper. It's in the Science Alert that summarizes (and editorializes) the paper. So you're outrage is misplaced. Always know the source of your information.
Well.... (Score:2)
.... because they don't drive cars?
Why speed limits are bad (Score:4, Interesting)
TFS: "When it's moderately busy, for instance, the authors found the ants actually speed up, accelerating until a maximum flow or capacity is reached."
If only we could convince enough humans to do this.
Ant (Score:2)
Traffic jams are a wave phenomenon, driven by slow reactions and fear. You dare not move fast when high speed only inches away will cause devastation should anything go wrong and you need to slow down. And micro imperfections are inevitable so will happen.
Ants don't have this issue since collisions would be inconsequential, so they all move at speed, and there is very little imperfection triggering a building slow wave as each following car slams on its brakes harder and harder as the response time shorte
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Also when situations get too crowded, ants can just walk on top of each other.
The best way automated cars could solve traffic jams is lifting them faster. They would still happen but they could be resolved faster. A traffic jam stick around because people deaccelerate faster into them than out of them, this even makes them grow over time. This creates a standing wave of a jam that will last until the car density is low enough.
well, there's your problem... (Score:2)
All it takes is a little selflessness and restraint.
So, the problem has no real solution, just imaginary ones.
They can climb over each other. (Score:2)
Ants easyly can carry multiple members of their own species in weight. If there's a jam, they will climb over each other. Or crawl along walls. ...
Do we really need a scientific study for this?
Ignores other advantages (Score:2)
Specifically, the ants don't use roads and mercilessly attack any non-ant that gets in there ways.
If car drivers were allowed to drive on the sidewalks and hit pedestrians traffic jams wouldn't be such a big deal either.
Ants don't fear death you dumb sons a bitches. (Score:2)
Jesus.