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Modeling Urban Panic
Schneier is reporting that Arizona State University's Paul Torrens has been developing a computer simulation to model urban panic. "The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation." The simulation tests behaviors from how a crowd flees from a burning car to how a pathogen might be transmitted through a mobile pedestrian over time among others.
The simulation tests behaviors from how a crowd flees from a burning car
Hmmm... my guess is AWAY from the burning car.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
a zombie attack? And if so, can it compensate for the differences between slow-moving George Romero zombies and fast-moving British zombies?
This should make factoring the optimum escape path from the impending zombie apocalypse trivial!
Does it account for transmission of pathogen by saliva?
didn't they do model this already in the Grand Theft Auto series?
step a. pedestrian looks at event.
step b. pedestrian throws hands in air.
step c. pedestrian runs away.
step d. pedestrian gets winded, approximately 1/2 block from event.
step e. pedestrian forgets event.
step f. pedestrian walks around aimlessly.
step g. (sometimes) pedestrian's head explodes, becomes event triggering new step a.
seemed pretty darn realistic to me.
its quite simple really, you see first they set up a AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA OMFG RUN!!!!!!!!!!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob;
Riot police. I've seen several demonstrations turn violent, and every single time it was preceded by riot police either attacking people (I've seen Metropolitan Police TSG hit a pregnant woman for talking back to them), herding people into an enclosed space and beating those who try and get out or baton charging a peaceful crowd.*
*This is not to say the police cause all riots, but they're certainly a factor in at least some of them.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
How can you have an urban panic without modeling a big, gray, atomic-breathed monster? Are they gonna CGI him, or Tron in some guy in a suit? :D
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
when Hollywood has done several studies on fleeing citizens already?
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
... can it predict how a crowd in Times Square will flee from the goatse guy being displayed on the jumbotron?
Trolling is a art,
All you have to do is knock out the west coast's WoW access on a saturday and wait.
Governement already knows: don't tell them and they won't panic until it becomes really obvious. Until that time, the roads are yours.
Did Rockstar make State of Emergency before or after GTA3?
God spoke to me.
by just studying a soccer match.
Wow. First, Shawn of the Dead was on this weekend. Then this story comes on. It's good they are building a more advanced way of modeling this, the previous way was rather simple.
Not my program, I found it years ago. There is a port of the 3D version on my site that I updated to run on OS X.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Much more interesting than the Schneir description of the actual site in question. Here they have fully rendered videos from multiple vantages of the studies amongst other research topics of the professor.
...and it should be known by now
I welcome our new Second Foundation overlords!
Hey! Get that Mule out of here!
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
The demo they show of the modeler shows scenarios where the subjects want to get to some place. That's neat and all, but in a panic, people aren't trying to get TO some place, they are trying to get AWAY from some place.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Back when I played Grand Theft Auto, I'd blow up a car in a crowd of people then watch them scatter. The ones who caught fire were my favorites. True story!
My CS AI prof at University of Reading had done this about 15 years ago, following the tube train fire at Kings Cross, London.
He created a model of the station and passengers, programmed only about 6 simple rules into the movenent of each passenger, and found that the model pretty accurately recreated where they found the actual bodies in the station.
There's already a zombie simulator. Save some research dollars and use that!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There was a fun Atari game called Agent USA that did this way back in 1984.
Czech it out! http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=GameMuseum.Detail&id=33
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
The included link is for a blog that links to a blog which links to the actual website: http://www.geosimulation.org/crowds/
with a CPU, a GPU, a PPU, a P'PU, a SAPU, a DIADRPU[TM], a TBNPU, and a CULCAOPU
* Central Processing Unit
* Graphics Processing Unit
* Physics Processing Unit
* Panic Processing Unit
* Sexual Arousal Processing Unit
* DRM Infringement Attempt Detection and Reporting Processing Unit(R)
* Terabit Network Processing Unit
* Computer Upgrade Loan Consolidation Assistance Offer Processing Unit
The link in the summary doesn't link to Dr. Torrens' actual research, but a blog about it. Here's the research's website: http://www.geosimulation.org/crowds/
So will it be able to simulate a anthrax covered minivan with seven free Wii systems in the trunk? Seems impossibly complex to me.
They should remember that sometimes it's cheaper to do experiments in real life.
Those people on the outside are pressing against the folks in the middle and people at the back are pressing forward. The nice stream shown doesn't appear to account for this, especially as none of the sims are crushed, trampled, or otherwise flattened in the mad rush to the door.
IRL, people on the outsides frantically push their way toward the exit, creating pressure on those in the center that frequently results in a crush of bodies that this model doesn't seem to model very well. If you've ever been in a situation where the crowd pressure to pass through a bottleneck is so strong that you can't move backward, hold still, or even effectively resist the rush, you know what I'm talking about.
This model seems to be a "in a perfect world, where the panicked crowd moves cooperatively and generally in an orderly fashion towards the exits" kind of model. It's hard to see how that's very useful in the context suggested (panic response).
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Dead Rising. I figure if I only buy a 360 and 2 games (halo 3 and dead rising) Microsoft is still in the hole right?
... the "where do we put the guys with tasers" problem.
That is all.
I was under the impression that urban panic is already well documented for many different scenarios, and I can't see how modelling it in a computer/mathematical simulation is in any way groundbreaking. It seems like the type of project you might set undergraduate students to do as a run of the mill exercise not something particularly groundbreaking and newsworthy.
Is there something about this particular approach that makes it groundbreaking?
to the research. Even better, the ASU press release went out seven months ago.
... shutdown /. for a few days. What the hell would I do all day - work? I'm getting creeped out just thinking about it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I wonder if this could used to model stock market panics and profit?
Schneier is reporting that Arizona State University's Paul Torrens has been developing a computer simulation to model urban panic.
Just come to Boston when it snows heavily mid-day on a workday. Last time it snowed:
The city pointed the finger at the state, while the state calmly said "we didn't have any problems except in Boston, hmmmmmmm, wonder why THAT could be?" I knew people that tried to get from Cambridge to West Roxbury and it took them NINE HOURS. Everyone who could take the subway or the green line routes that weren't blocked by traffic had zero problems.
Despite this, they still want to put a Biosafety Level 4 (ebola etc) lab smack in the middle of south boston; BU has been ramming it down our throats because their researchers are too damn lazy to drive out into the woods to do their potential-doomsday shit.
Please help metamoderate.
With proper modeling of urban panic, the authorities would have known the trade-offs a little better, and they could have prepared a little better. Maybe they would have known to block the on-ramps north of town. Of course, models are only as good as the data they're based on, and there's not much data to base some of their objectives on. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what policymakers can do with the information.
The summary links to a weblog [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/modeling_urban.html] which itself links to a weblog [http://pruned.blogspot.com/2007/06/modeling-urban-panic.html] which finally links to the article [http://www.geosimulation.org/crowds/]
Sheesh.
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all. -- Thomas J. Kopp
Am I the only one who thinks they are researching this just to figure out the best spots to install
these babies.
But... the future refused to change.
I wonder how this model can compensate for cultural differences. I was recently in China, where outside of major cities (Shanghai, Beijing) closer to the country (even in very large cities) there is no concept of waiting in line. It takes some getting used to, even after a month of acclimatizing I couldn't help but try to form a line, like i'm the one westerner who's going to show the 4 million people of Wuxi China how to wait in a line. How would crowds with that sort of cultural leaning move vs. say a very polite crowd where everyone tries to let other people go in front? How might these factors get paramaterized?
On another note the mall designed to get people to shop to death is about the scariest thing Ive ever heard of. After hearing of that I'm pretty sure this will end up being used for evil.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
you're supposed to run AWAY from the burning car. This model is clearly not based in the projects.
-- http://www.criticalassets.com
I think it would be pretty cool to use say the Sims video game data and these visualization techniques to explore different phenomena in a virtual world.
http://blog.slaingod.com
This completely reminded me of the opening of the London Millennium Bridge in London (crossing the Thames) were the bridge (nicknamed the Wobbly bridge) began to sway due to a few pedestrians who, by happenstance, inadvertently stepped in the same direction at the same time, causing a slight sway which on the rebound caused a few more people to step into the same direction, causing further swaying, increasing the effect w/ every oscillation. This effect is known as Synchronous Lateral Excitation. The funny thing is that each step, even several in synchrony, have negligible effects on bridge stress models... it was that this particular sway happened in such a way that forced more pedestrians on the bridge to step INTO the direction of the sway, continuing until most everyone on the bridge (up to 2,000 pedestrians) were contributing energy to the sway. The aforementioned is an instance of an unexpected design flaw due to inadequate modeling, and one can always come up w/ such instances, but these are meant to be learned and avoided... not repeated.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banlieue), "les banlieues" can be translated as suburbs, brothels or housing projects. It might be a good idea to find out which of these is being tested -- it's likely to make a big difference in how they can be reconfigured.
Bah! This has already been done, and THIS verson HAS Zombies: http://kevan.org/proce55ing/zombies/
that their work will be subject to some experimental validation shortly. Let's hope we all survive the test.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Let me know when they get to the real world testing.
HOLY SHIT, THAT TAXI IS GOING TO RUN ME OVER!!!!!!!!!
There you go. Didn't even need a complicated simulation.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Actually, you want to optimize your zombie horde with a mixture of fast and slow moving members. That way you get successive waves of brain eating obsession that no actor or sex starved teenager can ever hope to withstand.
In using the pathogens possibility, one presumes people know the existance of pathogens and thus flee.
In absence of that knowledge, of use would be a model based on a car not exploding, but being in some "lucky dip" prize at a dealership. People would converge tightly. Then disperse.
Much like I saw one time at a LAN party when someone put down a pile of pr0n CD's.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
These computer scientists have already developed a simulation of Urban Terror. Perhaps these two useful projects can share data, or even possibly merge!
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This will be so important to my SimCity urban destruction scenarios. Those little animations of running and screaming people are just so unconvincing!
Why did we get linked to a blog that links to another blog that finally links to the source material?
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Clearly wasn't writen by someone in Tokyo then... (^-^)
It's a shame the results aren't credible. If you could demonstrate that a basement carpark in a big assed shopping centre only needed a fire isolated stair every 60m rather than every 40m then that could save millions. Oh wait they did (under particular conditions).
Anyway, These things have been around for a while. The main thing is that they've needed someone with a phD in computational fluid dynamics to drive them on a box that costs a wee bit too.
thx e
Of course, if there happens to be a country at war... say, I dunno... Iraq... where events like burning cars in populated areas happen regularly, we could always just pay attention
Even though this research may not do me any good personally if I were in a panicking crowd situation... I'm glad it's being done. I am definitely fearful of being in large frenzied crowds. Perhaps it's being fueled by certain apocalyptic movies like 28 Days Later, I am Legend, or War of the Worlds. The image of thousands of other people with their own agenda to survive jam packed beside me is a horrible, horrible thing.
...about urban panic can be divined from watching Godzilla movies whilst passing the ol' bong.
In fact, that's what inspired the idea for this study: They were sitting around at a party doing just that, when the weed touched off one of those deeeep, meaningful conversations about the screaming masses in Tokyo that went on for a few hours. Then they wrote it up and called it a study.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
This reminds me of MouseHaus, a collaborative pedestrian simulation environment. Here's a video -- the pedestrian simulation stuff is about 2/3 into it. http://code.arc.cmu.edu/lab/html/video59.html
It was done by collaborators of my advisor.
I remember a documentary that said that a crowd of people is considered to flow like a fluid and the basic rules of fluid mechanics apply. The people in the documentary were designing new soccer stadiums with "diffusers" in them to slow the flow of people so no one will be trampled during a soccer riot. This research appears to take a little more psychological approach. However, it is not something totally new.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Don't forget to take into account that many white people will actually approach the danger
to inquire, "now what the heck is going on over here" instead of using common sense and
running like the rest of folks.