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Traffic is a chaos system, you can't engineer the edge cases. At best you have heuristics.
by kthejoker2 8y ago
Traffic is a chaos system, you can't engineer the edge cases. At best you have heuristics.
- gugagore 8y agoI don't think "traffic is chaotic" is the issue with driverless cars. We'd be satisfied with a car that solved everything except for global (i.e. non-local) traffic flow issues. That said, a dynamical system may exhibit chaos for one setting of the parameters, and may not exhibit chaos for other settings of the parameters. It may be true that the equations governing traffic flow have the potential to exhibit chaos, and do exhibit chaos when 1. humans drive, or 2. the drivers have only local sensing. But that doesn't mean it would still be true for driverless cars. But again, that's not the issue at play. We wouldn't fault an driverless car for getting stuck in traffic. It's more like it has to work when it's snowing, when you can't see the lane markers, when a kid in a trashbag costume jumps into the street, etc. Those are the edge cases that we care about right now.