New AI Algorithm Beats Even the World's Worst Traffic

The height of individual vs. collective irrationality has to be automobile traffic. We build roadways around the assumption that we as individual human actors will behave in ways that appear to reward those behaviors at the level of individuals but wind up harming the collective's goal of moving many cars through a limited amount of space as quickly as possible. Witness how a single greedy merge, for example, can send out a cascade of brake lights leading to a further wave of merges, some of which will themselves be greedy (careless). There really is no truly individual behavior in traffic and yet people are people. Fixing this is among the promises of driverless cars.