4 ms·
Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can be predicted
- alwa 2y agoSee also the submission of the paper itself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987646 (6 days ago, 92 points, 41 comments)
- jumploops 2y agoSomething something psychohistory
- paulddraper 2y agoIn Asimov’s Foundation series, a scientist Harry Seldon combines physiology, sociology, and statistics to create psychohistory. This allows him to predict planetary + galactic scale events, including a surprising and imminent regression of humanity into a new Dark Age.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2y agoNo need to explain the reference.
- solarengineer 2y agoThere are many who have not yet read the Foundation series.
- RestartKernel 2y agoI appreciated it.
- Carrok 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- jagged-chisel 2y agoFelt a lot like self-fulfilling prophecy when I read the series. Too many people were aware of the predictions.
- db48x 2y agoIt’s because there was no iteration. There was only one attempt to actually use the discovery to influence society. There should have been at least one smart bad guy who used knowledge of psychohistory to search for conditions that would favor his preferred outcomes over Seldon’s. There’s a smarter treatment of the idea in the John C. Wright’s “Count to the Eschaton” series.
- bobthepanda 2y agoThis is also eventually a plot point in Westworld.
- paulddraper 2y ago?? Do you not the know the Second Foundation?
- NineStarPoint 2y agoThe second foundation was also made by Harry Seldon though, there wasn't a completely separate force that attempted to change history using his research.
- db48x 2y agoCorrect. Meanwhile in the “Count to the Eschaton” series, all the bad guys know enough of psychohistory to do a lot of damage. The future does not at all go according to the plan made by the good guys, and as time goes on a greater and greater percentage of the population knows and employs the mathematics of psychohistory in their daily lives. In fact, that mathematics turns out to be much more widely applicable than mere Psychohistory, since it applies to all systems of all types and purposes, not just human societies. A small system like a web server is simple enough that you or I can confidently predict its eventual failure; the hardware simply doesn’t last forever so eventually a disk will fail or a capacitor will pop or whatever. But the company running the web server is a much more complex system that is much harder to predict. Does the company fail if it pivots to a different market and turns off the web server? Or if the cleaning lady unplugs it once a week to vacuum? If you want that particular web server, or the pages it serves, to last forever then you really have to design that corporation well. You don't want it to divert from the plans you gave it when the market changes and there is more profit to be made elsewhere. In fact to keep that web server running over the long term you really might have to design the society around it so that the situation _doesn’t_ change too much. Society will keep changing as fads come and go and people are born and die, but you want it to always orbit a chaotic attractor of your choosing in the phase space of possible societies. The series takes this idea to its logical extreme, giving the main characters access to and control over larger and larger systems until they are controlling vast galactic superclusters. The degree to which the many myriad intelligences, human and otherwise, in those vast systems can carry out the main character’s purposes over deep time depends on how well the rules they have devised work and how well those intelligences understand and implement them.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bad_haircut72 2y agoI predict the crowd runs away from the rampaging bulls
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoI hereby award an Ignoble prize for this work.
- dieselgate 2y agoThe posted article doesn’t talk about relationship/proximity to bulls directly. More like a large gathering of people in a plaza and is compared to another festival in Germany. The parent comment sounds funny but is not directly relevant to the content of the article.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoIgnoble was probably an autocowreck: it should be “Ig Nobel”. https://improbable.com/ig/winners/?amp=1 https://improbable.com/ig/winners/?amp=1
- thih9 2y agoSome proximity seems desired. If people didn’t want to be near rampaging bulls, they wouldn’t have attended the festival.
- vasco 2y agoJust like a spring. When far they want to get near, when near they want to get far away.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoAnd this is how we arrive at a Boids model for human crowds.
- brendoelfrendo 2y agoHm, new research topic: the Running of the Bulls as a prototype for rally racing fans.
- submeta 2y agoIsn‘t this old news? There is research that says that if x percent of a group moves in one direction, the rest will predictably follow. Swarm study reveals this. And this can be observerd in human crowds as well. I was wondering if Crypto whales use this insight to create FOMO and make them buy shitcoins in their pump and dump schemes.
- firtoz 2y agoYou may have something interesting here... If we represent: - the "price is rising or falling" as "a bull is approaching" - a combination of percentage stake + your buy price as "how close you are to the bull" (as in, how much you'd be impacted) - a sell action as "running in a particular direction" and so on, then that could perhaps be a decent model?
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoIt’s no coincidence there’s a raging bull sculpture on Wall Street.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoPresumably you’re joking, but I wanted to note that this is surely a coincidence. > The sculpture was created by Italian artist Arturo Di Modica in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. Late in the evening of Thursday, December 14, 1989, Di Modica arrived on Wall Street with Charging Bull on the back of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the New York Stock Exchange Building. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull
- egberts1 2y agoLike what I witnessed with ants in my childhood ant farms. Ant farm is the kind where dirt/sand is poured in between two glass panes and you watch them build tunnels and watch the ants interact with various things you drop inside it).
- mettamage 2y agoThat video is really illuminating in the article. I've experienced it once at the entrance of a concert. If you have all kinds of forces acting on you, then you don't have much autonomy on how you move. Would this to some extent be how actual fluid (e.g. water) move as well? I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there from one side of the liquid to the other side.
- soulofmischief 2y agoDrop some oil or food coloring into some water and swish it around!
- fc417fc802 2y agoYes, liquids are similar to what you describe. Although the forces are quite a bit more complex than just being packed into a tight space. > I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there That is how gasses are. Although in that case there are lots of high speed elastic collisions happening.
- psychoslave 2y agoSo, that's all very interesting. Do we also have some studies on how to avoid gathering people in such z dense level that all possibilities of that kind of dramatic outcome can occurs. Also note that not all crowds are the same. I went to some metal concerts where the moves would exhibits very different moves, including less packed and steal, split in in very highly packed borders before an abrupt run and merge, as well as creating protection circle around someone who falls on the ground. I actually didn't witnessed any major crowd incident in such a concert, so I would be interested to have statistics about outcomes of a crowd panic in a metal concert vs in a cinema for example.
- ses1984 2y agoIf you can have a circle pit then the density is probably less than 9 people per square meter.
- eleveriven 2y agoBut if anything, this study at least shows that we're getting closer to understanding and managing the dangers of large, dense crowds in a way that can actually be applied
- jrootabega 2y agoSeems to me that formal studies would have more of an effect looking at how to manage crowds that are already too dense without making things worse. If you want to avoid the density in the first place, you decide on a maximum density within a central perimeter, and also manage density appropriately along the ingress routes. That way you don't just push the unsafe densities into the outer side of the perimeter. And you set your desired densities low enough to both avoid dangerous situations inside the central perimeter, and allow the central crowd to get out if there is a fire/etc. inside it. Essentially if you want a max density in area A, you enforce some other max densities in the area several times larger than A.
- bobthepanda 2y agoI would imagine that if anyone has done the work to study this, it’s the Saudis for the Hajj, since they are managing the largest human migration to a single point. (I believe there are larger migrations like China’s Lunar New Year, but those are more diffuse since it’s more people to hometowns.)
- eleveriven 2y agoIt'd be interesting to see how this research could be used in real-time to guide emergency response teams or adjust crowd flow during large-scale events
- itronitron 2y agoThere has been a lot of research, and civil engineering presumably, to manage crowds for the Hajj pilgrimage at Mecca.
- talideon 2y agoIsn't this what Navier-Stokes is for, or am I misunderstanding things? Does this improve on it in some way not clear from the article?
- dieselgate 2y agoIt’s not clear to me either. I’ve heard for a long time - including in undergrad fluid mechanics - how large groups of humans can be modeled via fluid mech equations. But this article seems to provide more robust evidence of these occurrences IRL. It more draws parallels between the oscillations seen in crowds in Pamplona and another large gathering in Germany. Which have similar flow properties. It also seems to specify the density with which these properties emerge
- staplung 2y agoI feel like the headline is seriously misleading. The TL;DR is basically "the authors observed pockets of several hundred people spontaneously behaving like one fluid that oscillated" over an 18 second period. That hardly seems to amount to "predicting crowd movements" in any meaningful sense.