Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path. Nagar says there are three main reasons ants dont jam up. No. 1, ants dont have egos. They dont show off by zooming past people. The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents or collisions, say Nagar. So unless theres a serious pileup, they just keep going. The third reason, he says, is that ants seem to get more disciplined when paths get crowded, running in straighter lines and varying their speed less. Theyre less likely to make unexpected moves in this sort of heavy traffic. Its the kind of steady control you see when a computer, rather than a human, is controlling a car. Theres less variability unless its absolutely called for. Nagar felt this kind of behavior could be explained by something called the Langevin equation, an equation physicists use when describing the movement of liquids, or how individual atoms behave in a lattice. And what, you ask, is the Langevin equation? I wasnt entirely sure, so I turned to Thomas D. Donnelly, a physics professor at Harvey Mudd College. This is basically a reworking of Newtons famous F=MA equation, Donnelly told me — force equals mass times acceleration. So its all Newton, Donnelly says, but theyre using a special description of the forces which includes a random component..... .....Nagar is not sure how relevant his model will be for human traffic engineers. After all, he agrees that allowing cars to bump into each other at 60 mph may be a nonstarter, although greater discipline and less ego may help keep traffic flowing smoothly. Theres one other tiny problem. Nagar is a physicist, not an ant man. Ive talked with ant researchers who say that, for at least some species of ants, one will overtake another on the ant highway. And when the volume of ants is high enough, ants do jam up. I suppose you could solve that latter problem by building more ant highways.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 06:12:52 +0000
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