In an NPR interview, physicist Apoorva Nagar discussed how he thinks studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams.
Nagar, from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, 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 don't jam up. No. 1, ants don't have egos. They don't show off by zooming past people.
"The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents or collisions," say Nagar. So unless there's 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. They're less likely to make unexpected moves in this sort of heavy traffic. It's the kind of steady control you see when a computer, rather than a human, is controlling a car. There's less variability unless it's 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.
Click here to listen to the entire interview.
Source: NPR