Teaching machines to direct traffic through deep reinforcement learning

Rush hour--the dreaded time of day when traffic conditions seem bent on making you late. As your car slowly creeps in line behind countless others stuck at a stop light, you think to yourself, "Why aren't these lights changing faster?" Traffic control scientists have long tried to solve this signaling problem. Unfortunately, the complexity of traffic situations makes the job extremely hard. A recent study suggests that machines can learn how to plan traffic signals just right to reduce wait times and make traffic queues shorter.