Right. But also -- oh, I'll just copy the comment I just wrote over on Facebook: ------
But Gregory Stuart Pettigrew hit on the real challenge. The thing is, for this to achieve the desired goal -- fewer stops and improved throughput -- you probably need to require that everyone use the same legally-mandated algorithm. Otherwise, I just tune my car to be more aggressive than yours, and that's great for me until we hit a terribly literal tragedy of the commons in the middle of some intersection.
The logistics of getting all cars on the same algorithm are nightmarish. Agreeing on a *protocol* that you must abide by isn't too terrible, but getting all the nuances of an algorithm precisely to spec can be challenging, given that everybody's on different chipsets.
And the algorithm itself is likely to be challenging, to say the least -- there are lots of obvious failure modes that result in cars going, "After you, my dear Alphonse" at each other.
Keep in mind, I wrote one of the first major peer-to-peer videogames, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart. I came away from three years of P2P projects concluding that:
a) Almost anything you can do with a central server, you can do distributed.
b) Doing it distributed and *well* is usually much harder than building a centralized solution.
Could it be done? Yes. Do I trust modern society to not fuck it up? Really not. (Whereas I think the centralized version is a *bit* more plausible, albeit with its own problems.)
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Date: 2017-06-08 06:05 pm (UTC)------
But Gregory Stuart Pettigrew hit on the real challenge. The thing is, for this to achieve the desired goal -- fewer stops and improved throughput -- you probably need to require that everyone use the same legally-mandated algorithm. Otherwise, I just tune my car to be more aggressive than yours, and that's great for me until we hit a terribly literal tragedy of the commons in the middle of some intersection.
The logistics of getting all cars on the same algorithm are nightmarish. Agreeing on a *protocol* that you must abide by isn't too terrible, but getting all the nuances of an algorithm precisely to spec can be challenging, given that everybody's on different chipsets.
And the algorithm itself is likely to be challenging, to say the least -- there are lots of obvious failure modes that result in cars going, "After you, my dear Alphonse" at each other.
Keep in mind, I wrote one of the first major peer-to-peer videogames, so this is a topic near and dear to my heart. I came away from three years of P2P projects concluding that:
a) Almost anything you can do with a central server, you can do distributed.
b) Doing it distributed and *well* is usually much harder than building a centralized solution.
Could it be done? Yes. Do I trust modern society to not fuck it up? Really not. (Whereas I think the centralized version is a *bit* more plausible, albeit with its own problems.)
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