[HN Gopher] Want to Get Out Alive? Follow the Ants
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Want to Get Out Alive? Follow the Ants
Author : dnetesn
Score : 74 points
Date : 2021-02-03 11:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| DennisP wrote:
| > In a room with six exits, it seems like the most logical course
| of action would be for the crowd to divide evenly among all six.
| Instead, we stampede to just one.
|
| Something to watch out for if ever in that situation.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| This gave me the mental image of an HNer patting himself on the
| back for not following the crowd after finding himself burning
| alive in the nightclub's broom closet as it burns down.
| blablablerg wrote:
| Yeah exactly this. If you know all the exits are safe, then
| evenly splitting up is best. But I reckon in situations like
| this, most of the time you don't know and then following the
| rest seems like the best strategy to me.
| DennisP wrote:
| It seems like the best strategy because you figure other
| people know something you don't know. But since they
| _always_ pick just one exit, that 's not a valid
| conclusion.
|
| Since the crowd behaves the same way whether they picked
| the best exit or a random one, you have no idea whether
| it's the best way out, but you do know it has added risk of
| delay and trampling.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The broom closet scenario isn't really possible; if the
| door isn't an exit, it won't have the big EXIT sign over
| it.
| macintux wrote:
| I attended some emergency training a couple of years ago,
| and the instructor drove home one point in particular:
| _always_ identify the exits when you're in an unfamiliar
| building.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| In high school I got caught in the crowd once following a
| release from some kind of pep rally, I was effectively crushed
| against a wall while it passed. The gymnasium had plenty of
| exits, but the field-side wasn't where anyone wanted to go.
| Classes and the cafeteria were through three double-door exits
| on the non-field-side. After that one mistake, I started going
| toward the field and then walked around the exterior. I've kept
| that pattern up whenever I'm in any crowded place with a lot of
| people being released at once. I look specifically for the
| reasonable exits that are away from most people's interest,
| even if it takes me a bit longer (often it's faster because
| there is no crowd jamming up the exit).
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Movie theaters (remember those?) usually have a door or two
| up by the screen that no one uses. Most of the time I have
| seen them lead out some weird hallway that goes directly
| outside. They usually aren't emergency exits either. All
| around pretty great.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| And many, in the US, don't alarm their emergency exits.
| I've used those to good effect when I've opted to see a
| particularly popular new release. You can usually park
| behind/beside the theater, not just in the main lot, so
| these exits are actually faster for accessing your car and
| then you can use access roads behind the theater to exit
| the parking lot as well.
| macintux wrote:
| Often they go directly outside. I once was seated near such
| an exit when someone who had apparently left (and left
| something behind) started hammering on the exit door.
|
| This was years before the Aurora shooting, and after
| looking around at everyone else who didn't want to make the
| decision either, I let him in instead of letting him
| continue to distract from the movie.
|
| Bad decision, one I'd definitely not repeat.
| sethammons wrote:
| How many Aurora shootings have there been? How many
| people have used those doors as entrances? I very much
| suspect the odds suggest it was not a bad decision.
| bluntfang wrote:
| and this thought process is why we take off our shoes at
| airports
| corobo wrote:
| > I once was seated near such an exit when someone who
| had apparently left (and left something behind) started
| hammering on the exit door.
|
| Pretty sure you let in a freeloader, haha
| macintux wrote:
| Nah, he grabbed something in a seat and left.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Ditto old theatre buildings in London's theatreland. These
| alt routes help deconflict the people exiting the current
| show from those coming in to see the next one.
| virtualmachine7 wrote:
| Ant death spiral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0HoqjxfvJ4
| Lammy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
| handol wrote:
| I was really hoping that would be about using this ant
| swirling phenomenon to drive machinery.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The mechanisms for ants and humans clumping behaviours are, I
| expect, quite different. My understanding is that we are looking
| and listening while ants are smelling and feeling. This means
| that the actual architectural insights you get from ants - put a
| column here and a door there - might not generalize to humans.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| In very crowded situations you end up with something closer to
| the ant-like behavior. Your visibility is reduced to your
| immediate neighbors, and theirs is similarly limited. This
| prevents the deliberate movement you'd see in lower crowd
| situations, or where people are very familiar with their
| surroundings.
|
| That is, a stadium exit is _not_ like the exit of a thousand
| workers from a factory at the end of the shift. The factory
| workers (ok, not always) know their path and may have an action
| to perform on exit (punching out) which establishes a tempo. A
| stadium exit is more freeform and people are less familiar with
| their overall exit plan. So they jump into the stream and go
| where it goes. They have to move as fast as the crowd behind
| them pushes them or faster.
| wpasc wrote:
| Stadiums have signs though? Clearly lit pathways, signs, and
| directions to all the exits. I'm pretty sure it's the law to
| have those (at least for fire codes). I would be highly
| surprised if people followed their nearest neighbor instead
| of moving in a direction denoted by the signs and pathways
| prescribed.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Yes, but when you're in a _packed_ crowd even these may
| become difficult to see for any individual. Think no real
| room to move freely, maybe not even 1 ' in any direction
| other than "forward", the direction in which the crowd is
| _clearing_.
| setr wrote:
| I visited Venkateswara Temple in India, which gets some
| 50~100k visitors daily. The main takeaway I got was that it
| doesn't really matter what the path is -- you don't get a
| say in the matter. The flow of the crowd moves you along,
| and that's all there is to it.
|
| You have people pushing from all around you (in a vague
| general direction), and next to no space to actually
| influence your movement -- and the lack of choice in the
| matter is fairly incredible. The pushing stops coming from
| any particular place, it just becomes some indeterminate
| feeling of _pressure_ forcing you along.
|
| I'm quite positive you could easily be crushed by it,
| getting caught between a pole somewhere in the path, and
| with no external factor to influence the crowd (a wall is
| clearly visible, a pole is not), simply be pressed against
| it indefinitely.
|
| A stadium probably isn't an intense, but likely similar --
| once you're in the stream, the only thing that matters is
| stream.
|
| Eventually, you're suddenly ejected from the stream and
| have to figure things out for yourself again.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > the lack of choice in the matter is fairly incredible.
| The pushing stops coming from any particular place, it
| just becomes some indeterminate feeling of pressure
| forcing you along.
|
| You can experience this in total safety any day you want
| by riding a subway during rush hour in a populous city.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The conclusion here seems off:
|
| > Ants have been learning how to deal with congestion for
| millions of years. They might just show us the way out.
|
| But the research here doesn't involve studying ants to learn
| their successful evacuation strategies. It involves noticing that
| ants don't seem to have any special strategies, studying which
| room layouts seem to make things easier for their strategyless
| approach, and then using those same layouts for human rooms,
| since humans, just like ants, have no particular evacuation
| strategies.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I think this is right. In my boredom, I have studied ants and
| my observation was that they seem to send a small number of
| ants in multiple directions, carving a room up into sections.
| If an ant finds something of value, they change their pheromone
| to something that attracts the other ants. With time, they all
| eventually lock onto that pheromone trail, especially if it
| involves food. On a side note, they especially like vodka and I
| suspect they are disallowed from drinking it, as the bigger
| ants come along and chop off their heads. I was taken aback and
| never gave them alcohol again. Anyway, it seems this behavior
| is how they manage to find food and then transport it back to
| their nest. If you get this pheromone on your hands, the ants
| will swarm you and run around in different directions very
| chaotically. It seems to be a chemical based form of group
| think. Perhaps their intelligence should be measured as a
| group.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| You might be interested in this conference talk from a few
| years ago:
|
| https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa16/conference-
| program/...
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Does anyone know what's up with this account? They submit
| nautil.us and phys.org articles in rigid alternation and they
| seem to hit the frontpage with unlikely regularity, especially
| for a religious organization like nautil.us.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The submitter isn't the one who upvotes it to the front page,
| so what does it matter who submits what from where?
| LilBytes wrote:
| It's a religious site?
| sli wrote:
| I think you may have mixed up Nautilus Quarterly (this site)
| with The Nautilus, a long defunct New Thought Movement
| magazine.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| No I don't think so:
|
| https://www.templeton.org/grant/nautilus-magazine
| [deleted]
| tzs wrote:
| That they give grants to something doesn't mean that thing
| is religious. For example, they give grants to PBS [1] [2]
| for Nova and I doubt many would argue that Nova is a
| religious program or PBS is a religious broadcaster.
|
| [1] https://www.templeton.org/grant/nova-programming-on-
| quantum-...
|
| [2] https://www.templeton.org/grant/nova-programming-on-
| the-cosm...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| PBS broadcasts a lot of infomercials promoting quackery.
| jrockway wrote:
| Looking at Nautilus's about page, they seem to have many
| other funding sources (including readers).
|
| Wikipedia doesn't seem to think they are particularly
| religious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_Quarterly
| ivanbakel wrote:
| What makes nautil.us a religious organisation?
|
| And their submission history looks to me to be full of whiffs,
| rather than getting the frontpage with "unlikely regularity".
| The user could be a bot, but both of those sources are well in
| the curiosity-gratifying wheelhouse of the average HN reader.
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Probably a bot or marketing person on a schedule. The article
| is from a few days ago too.
| omginternets wrote:
| I wonder, is this somehow a latency-throughput tradeoff in
| disguise?
|
| This seems roughly analogous to batch processing, where you
| structure the dataflow to be mechanically sympathetic to the
| machine doing the processing. Processing each item becomes more
| efficient, so you process more items per unit of time, but each
| item takes longer to process individually.
|
| In the same way, it seems like we're structuring the crowd into
| columns to optimize the layout of individuals with respect to the
| floorspace. It takes less time to evacuate everybody, but each
| person spends more time in the building.
|
| I'm not sure what to do with this knowledge, if it is indeed
| correct.
|
| EDIT: I think the question I'm orbiting is whether or not this
| strategy can generalize to people. In the realm of ants, things
| like self-preservation and the value of the individual are very
| different from humans.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It is definitely not a latency-throughput tradeoff in disguise,
| since the metric is "time taken for everyone to leave the
| enclosure".
|
| > it seems like we're structuring the crowd into columns to
| optimize the layout of individuals with respect to the
| floorspace. It takes less time to evacuate everybody, but each
| person spends more time in the building.
|
| As stated, this is impossible. Everyone starts inside.[1] If
| the time taken to empty the building is lower, it cannot be the
| case that each person spends more time inside; at least one
| person takes the full evacuation time, or else the evacuation
| time would be lower.
|
| [1] This is the core difference from the analogy you picked,
| batch processing, in which jobs arrive at different times. If
| all the jobs arrived at once, batch processing would be the
| only possible kind of processing.
| omginternets wrote:
| >This is the core difference
|
| Got it! Thanks for taking the time to point out my error.
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