Taking Traffic Control Lessons — From Ants
By Brandon Keim - February 3, 2009 If humans took their cues from ants, they might spend less time in traffic. When opposing streams of leafcutter ants share a narrow path, they instinctively alternate flows in the most efficient way possible. Studying how ants manage this could provide the basis for a system of driverless cars running on ant traffic algorithms. "They never get stuck in traffic," said Audrey Dussutour , a University of Sydney entomologist. "We should use their rules. I’ve been working with ants for eight years, and have never seen a traffic jam — and I’ve tried." People have long been fascinated with the ability of ants to organize colonial activities in patterns as sophisticated as any urban engineer’s megalopolis blueprint. In recent years, scientists have turned ant traffic flows into algorithms applicable to data transmission and vehicular traffic . Dussutour, whose earlier work showed that leafcutter ants organi...