Traffic Wouldn’t Jam If Drivers Behaved Like Ants | Nautilus

Tom Vanderbilt (author of Traffic) writes about traffic again in "Traffic Wouldn’t Jam If Drivers Behaved Like Ants" for Nautilus, discussing Ant Colony Optimization and route choice. Our work gets a mention:

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These “traces in the environment,” in a process generally referred to as “stigmergy,” help explain how simple agents, without a larger meta-ability to communicate, coordinate, or structure their transport networks, can display such “surprisingly intelligent collective behavior.” Humans are not so ruthlessly efficient—the University of Minnesota transportation researcher David Levinson found, in one study, that only 15 percent of daily commuters were on the shortest route possible.