simulation
17 posts
On the surface, driving a car might seem fairly straightforward. Follow the rules of the road, don’t crash, and watch out for others. So why not just let a computer do all of the work? The Washington Post provides an interactive simulator to put you in the passenger seat and see for yourself. Tags: game, self-driving, simulation, Washington Post
During a game, the range of emotions can vary widely across a crowd. Will Hipson, making use of some emotion dynamics, simulated how that range can change through a game: What I’m striving to simulate are the laws of emotion dynamics (Kuppens & Verduyn, 2017). Emotions change from moment to moment, but there’s also some stability from one moment to the next. Apart from when a basket is scored, most...
Kevin Simler uses interactive simulations to explain how things — ideas, disease, memes — spread through a network. It always looks like concentrated chaos to begin, but then the things infect quickly. Adjust variables, press play, and watch them go. Tags: diffusion, network, simulation
When you drink bubble tea, ideally you’d like to finish with the same proportions of boba and tea that you started at. Krist Wongsuphasawat took care of the math and provides a simulator for this ever important challenge: This article simulates an optimized sip based on amount of boba and tea in the straw before sipping (method adopted from this post). The simulation assumes that all bobas sit in the...
Adam Pearce for The New York Times describes the sad state of affairs that is the delayed subway trains in New York. One delay causes a ripple effect down the line, leaving little chance to get back on track. The more straightforward figures gear you up for the overall view at the end. This was for New York specifically but is applicable to other transits and forms of transportation. See...
NASA. Data. Good. Tracking the aerosols carried on the winds let scientists see the currents in our atmosphere. This visualization follows sea salt, dust, and smoke from July 31 to November 1, 2017, to reveal how these particles are transported across the map. The first thing that is noticeable is how far the particles can travel. Smoke from fires in the Pacific Northwest gets caught in a weather pattern and...
Here’s a fun what-if simulation that imagines a world where all natural causes of death were gone. People only die of things like car crashes and homicide. The result: people who live to thousands of years old. Of course, this assumes that the likelihood of dying from external causes stays the same. With such a long life expectancy, do people start to take more risks? Or do we become more...
Disinformation is kind of a problem these days, yeah? Fatih Erikli uses a simulation that works like a disaster spread model applied to social networks to give an idea of how disinformation spreads. I tried to visualize how a disinformation becomes a post-truth by the people who subscribed in a network. We can think this network as a social media such as Facebook or Twitter. The nodes (points) in the...
Uber uses psychology and video game mechanics to encourage drivers to work longer and drive in certain areas. Noam Scheiber for The New York Times details the gray area that Uber resides in since drivers aren’t official employees. Uber exists in a kind of legal and ethical purgatory, however. Because its drivers are independent contractors, they lack most of the protections associated with employment. By mastering their workers’ mental circuitry,...