LO – 9

I decided to look at Helen Cheng’s looking outwards from week 2. It was on Robert Hodgin’s ‘Traffic’ piece. Being a driver myself, I found this piece very interesting and agreed on many of the points Helen mentioned in her blog post. The simulation is busy, and the cars have an “aggressiveness” to them like humans do. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been overwhelmed by cars running reds, blocking the intersection, etc. People don’t always make the smartest decisions on the road, and this simulation captures it pretty well. The thing I find the most interesting, however, is the attempt to make a computer act human. Even with the “aggressiveness” coded in, this project doesn’t make accidents happen and the traffic still flows more seamlessly than traffic in real life. I know it would be much more difficult to code and he wanted to keep things pretty simple, but it somewhat works in a way. What I mean by that is the whole idea of self-driving cars. Once self-driving cars are at their finest, and everyone is using them accidents should be minimal and traffic will probably look quite similar to this. It was very interesting to think about how code can be manipulated to show human flaws, and on the flip-side, give us insight into what automation has the potential for.

As always, here’s the link to Robert’s website:

Traffic

And two videos of his simulation: