Autoblog

Eric Horvitz is the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, as well as being an AI researcher at Microsoft. When stuck in traffic one day in Seattle, he asked his nav system to reroute him via side streets, and the result was worse than being stuck on the highway. That incident turned into four years of research and data collection on traffic patterns to create the Clearflow traffic avoidance system for Microsoft's web portal-based Live Search Maps.

The point of Clearflow is to provide accurate route information that gives you the best chance to avoid traffic on highways and on the side streets. By logging data from 16,500 trips over 125,000 miles, Microsoft engineers came up with algorithms to predict traffic flow on highways and adjacent streets, the latter of which can be even more crowded than the main arteries.

Using the data collected in Seattle, along with the results from highway sensors, the system works for 72 cities, and can "predict congestion based on time of day, weather and other variables like sporting events." Clearflow went live Thursday, April 10, with the choice to "Choose route based on traffic".

[Source: New York Times]

Click above to watch video

Shockwave traffic jams -- the kind where you slow down and speed up (with others behind you doing the same thing) -- have finally been recreated in a controlled environment (woo-hoo!). Theories about the causes of traffic jams have been computer modeled before, but here hasn't been a live demonstration of how a body of traffic goes from highway speeds to a dead stop -- for no apparent reason -- until now.

A team of Japanese scientists put 22 cars on a circular track and told them to drive about 20-MPH. Sure enough, a few laps in, uneven gaps appeared between the cars. Then a group of cars got bunched up. The people at the back of the bunch sometimes had to come to a stop. The car at the front of the bunch would lurch away... only to rejoin the back of the bunch on the other side of the circle.

Now that the phenomenon has been recreated in "lab" conditions, the greatest minds of our generation can get to fixing it. Or, not really, since the cause of shockwave jams is conclusively shown to be -- tada! -- human error. Some folks just can't go with the flow when traffic needs it most. So while fixing human error might not be on the cards, at least there's some hope now for traffic jams. Watch video of the artificial shockwave traffic jam after the jump. Thanks for the tip, Ben!

[Source: New Scientist]