[HN Gopher] Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crow...
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Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can
be predicted
Author : gmays
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-02-12 14:58 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| alwa wrote:
| See also the submission of the paper itself
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987646
|
| (6 days ago, 92 points, 41 comments)
| jumploops wrote:
| Something something psychohistory
| paulddraper wrote:
| In Asimov's Foundation series, a scientist Harry Seldon
| combines physiology, sociology, and statistics to create
| psychohistory.
|
| This allows him to predict planetary + galactic scale events,
| including a surprising and imminent regression of humanity into
| a new Dark Age.
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| No need to explain the reference.
| solarengineer wrote:
| There are many who have not yet read the Foundation series.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| I appreciated it.
| Carrok wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Felt a lot like self-fulfilling prophecy when I read the
| series. Too many people were aware of the predictions.
| db48x wrote:
| It's because there was no iteration. There was only one
| attempt to actually use the discovery to influence society.
| There should have been at least one smart bad guy who used
| knowledge of psychohistory to search for conditions that
| would favor his preferred outcomes over Seldon's.
|
| There's a smarter treatment of the idea in the John C.
| Wright's "Count to the Eschaton" series.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This is also eventually a plot point in Westworld.
| paulddraper wrote:
| ??
|
| Do you not the know the Second Foundation?
| paulddraper wrote:
| That doesn't really matter, does it?
|
| The premise was that even being aware of the impending
| collapse was not enough to stop it.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| I predict the crowd runs away from the rampaging bulls
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I hereby award an Ignoble prize for this work.
| dieselgate wrote:
| The posted article doesn't talk about relationship/proximity
| to bulls directly. More like a large gathering of people in a
| plaza and is compared to another festival in Germany.
|
| The parent comment sounds funny but is not directly relevant
| to the content of the article.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Ignoble was probably an autocowreck: it should be "Ig Nobel".
| https://improbable.com/ig/winners/?amp=1
| thih9 wrote:
| Some proximity seems desired. If people didn't want to be near
| rampaging bulls, they wouldn't have attended the festival.
| vasco wrote:
| Just like a spring. When far they want to get near, when near
| they want to get far away.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And this is how we arrive at a Boids model for human crowds.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Hm, new research topic: the Running of the Bulls as a
| prototype for rally racing fans.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| I don't know about that... some of the clips I've seen of
| rally racing fans, they get closer when they're already
| close.
| submeta wrote:
| Isn't this old news? There is research that says that if x
| percent of a group moves in one direction, the rest will
| predictably follow. Swarm study reveals this. And this can be
| observerd in human crowds as well.
|
| I was wondering if Crypto whales use this insight to create FOMO
| and make them buy shitcoins in their pump and dump schemes.
| firtoz wrote:
| You may have something interesting here...
|
| If we represent:
|
| - the "price is rising or falling" as "a bull is approaching"
|
| - a combination of percentage stake + your buy price as "how
| close you are to the bull" (as in, how much you'd be impacted)
|
| - a sell action as "running in a particular direction"
|
| and so on, then that could perhaps be a decent model?
| taneq wrote:
| One might assume that such a system would be more active in a
| bear market than a bull market. ;)
| firtoz wrote:
| Hmm... so we need to also simulate climbing trees (for some
| bear markets) and playing dead (for other bear markets) as
| well as running away and punching the head of the bear.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| It's no coincidence there's a raging bull sculpture on Wall
| Street.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Presumably you're joking, but I wanted to note that this is
| surely a coincidence.
|
| > The sculpture was created by Italian artist Arturo Di
| Modica in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market
| crash. Late in the evening of Thursday, December 14, 1989, Di
| Modica arrived on Wall Street with Charging Bull on the back
| of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the
| New York Stock Exchange Building.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull
| Talanes wrote:
| I wouldn't call that entirely coincidental. Di Modica
| picked a bull because it was a well understood metaphor for
| market optimism. The bull-run analogy, while not being
| central to the financial bull concept, has been applied to
| it plenty.
|
| See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3
| /36/Wa...
| taurknaut wrote:
| Why else would you put a bull in front of the stock
| exchange except as commentary on assholes pitching bull
| markets? How could you possibly construe this as a
| coincidence?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > assholes pitching bull markets
|
| Totally willing to believe I'm just naive about this; I
| don't see what "bull market vs. bear market" has to do
| with the running of the bulls festival.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Like what I witnessed with ants in my childhood ant farms.
|
| Ant farm is the kind where dirt/sand is poured in between two
| glass panes and you watch them build tunnels and watch the ants
| interact with various things you drop inside it).
| mettamage wrote:
| That video is really illuminating in the article. I've
| experienced it once at the entrance of a concert. If you have all
| kinds of forces acting on you, then you don't have much autonomy
| on how you move.
|
| Would this to some extent be how actual fluid (e.g. water) move
| as well? I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there from
| one side of the liquid to the other side.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Drop some oil or food coloring into some water and swish it
| around!
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Yes, liquids are similar to what you describe. Although the
| forces are quite a bit more complex than just being packed into
| a tight space.
|
| > I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there
|
| That is how gasses are. Although in that case there are lots of
| high speed elastic collisions happening.
| psychoslave wrote:
| So, that's all very interesting. Do we also have some studies on
| how to avoid gathering people in such z dense level that all
| possibilities of that kind of dramatic outcome can occurs.
|
| Also note that not all crowds are the same. I went to some metal
| concerts where the moves would exhibits very different moves,
| including less packed and steal, split in in very highly packed
| borders before an abrupt run and merge, as well as creating
| protection circle around someone who falls on the ground. I
| actually didn't witnessed any major crowd incident in such a
| concert, so I would be interested to have statistics about
| outcomes of a crowd panic in a metal concert vs in a cinema for
| example.
| ses1984 wrote:
| If you can have a circle pit then the density is probably less
| than 9 people per square meter.
| eleveriven wrote:
| But if anything, this study at least shows that we're getting
| closer to understanding and managing the dangers of large,
| dense crowds in a way that can actually be applied
| jrootabega wrote:
| Seems to me that formal studies would have more of an effect
| looking at how to manage crowds that are already too dense
| without making things worse. If you want to avoid the density
| in the first place, you decide on a maximum density within a
| central perimeter, and also manage density appropriately along
| the ingress routes. That way you don't just push the unsafe
| densities into the outer side of the perimeter. And you set
| your desired densities low enough to both avoid dangerous
| situations inside the central perimeter, and allow the central
| crowd to get out if there is a fire/etc. inside it.
|
| Essentially if you want a max density in area A, you enforce
| some other max densities in the area several times larger than
| A.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I would imagine that if anyone has done the work to study
| this, it's the Saudis for the Hajj, since they are managing
| the largest human migration to a single point. (I believe
| there are larger migrations like China's Lunar New Year, but
| those are more diffuse since it's more people to hometowns.)
| taurknaut wrote:
| Crowd density is certainly the key here. Over a certain density
| crowds move like a liquid. Under a certain density crowds get
| much more difficult to model.
|
| This is not new in any way, btw. This paper seems to
| specifically address the running of the bulls.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat9891
| eleveriven wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see how this research could be used in
| real-time to guide emergency response teams or adjust crowd flow
| during large-scale events
| itronitron wrote:
| There has been a lot of research, and civil engineering
| presumably, to manage crowds for the Hajj pilgrimage at Mecca.
| talideon wrote:
| Isn't this what Navier-Stokes is for, or am I misunderstanding
| things? Does this improve on it in some way not clear from the
| article?
| dieselgate wrote:
| It's not clear to me either. I've heard for a long time -
| including in undergrad fluid mechanics - how large groups of
| humans can be modeled via fluid mech equations. But this
| article seems to provide more robust evidence of these
| occurrences IRL. It more draws parallels between the
| oscillations seen in crowds in Pamplona and another large
| gathering in Germany. Which have similar flow properties.
|
| It also seems to specify the density with which these
| properties emerge
| staplung wrote:
| I feel like the headline is seriously misleading. The TL;DR is
| basically "the authors observed pockets of several hundred people
| spontaneously behaving like one fluid that oscillated" over an 18
| second period. That hardly seems to amount to "predicting crowd
| movements" in any meaningful sense.
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