Aussie Government Competition To Predict Commute Times

databuff writes "Last week, Sydney's Minister of Roads, David Borger, launched a $10,000 competition to develop an algorithm that predicts commute times on a major Sydney freeway. The winning algorithm will be used to power predictions on the Sydney live traffic website. The hope is that the predictions will help commuters make informed decisions about when to travel and on what routes, lowering the intensity of peak hour traffic. In its first week, the competition attracted entries from more than 50 teams and 19 countries."

Comments

Re:Thats easy

[TapeCutter]

Here's a simple algorithim to find the the end of the evening peak hour in Sydney. Write a bot that looks for the first slashdot story of the day tagged with 'Australia'.

Re:Thats easy

[MichaelSmith]

You know the slashdot web server logs could estimate travel times fairly well by looking at IP addresses for accounts. User stops browsing at work and starts browsing 45 (or in Sydney 90) minutes later from home.