Slashdot Mirror
Hajj Pilgrimage Safety Challenges Crowd Simulator Technology
agent elevator writes: In 2010, Saudi Arabia hosted an international design competition aimed at safely accommodating more pilgrims at Mecca's Grand Mosque. One of the participants told IEEE Spectrum that the crowd densities there (6 people per square meter) bogged down off-the-shelf software so badly that simulation run times were about 10 to 20 times slower than real time crowd movement. Nevertheless, he found some workarounds that gave designers a plan to double the Grand Mosque's peak visitor rate from 40,000 to 102,000 people per hour. Last week's stampede took place well away from the mosque, but signals sent to pilgrims telling them when to speed up or slow down could help prevent such a tragedy, the crowd simulation expert said.
Other engineers are turning to fuzzy logic as way to predict how crowds will react in a panic.
The premise behind these simulations is that giving directions to crowds will improve flow of people.
It's a mighty big assumption that the folks in the crowds would follow a signal to "slow down". Between the culture in general (ever see a tidy British style queue in the middle east?), and the general human dynamics of large crowds of people, I don't have much hope of this being a success.
Perhaps a better solution would be to increase the time window for this event- spread the crowd over a few months instead of a few days.
FTW!
Didn't Allah will those people to get trampled? Why would they contradict Allah's will?
Have them all stand still on a moving track.
Note that here the concept is that controlling the flow of the crowd is the automation piece. Whether you enact it through 'traffic signals', alerts to mobile devices, or send the data to uniformed officers to tell them how to direct traffic, the core is the automation piece here. An individual human at a given point does not have the awareness of the bigger picture to make the correct decision on how to flow traffic. So the discussion of having a human versus a signal light or other mechanism is not pertinent to the discussion at hand.
But going back to ignoring signals, this is actually a case where they would likely be followed. There's no pressing reason to ignore the directions (if it is going well) and while a few might opt to ignore it if they were alone, we are talking about a very crowded scenario. Here if even if only 30% of people would honor the signs individually, the entire crowd would probably honor the signs seeing such a high volume of people doing so. If it were midnight and someone who would run it pulls up next to someone who is stopped, they'd probably at least wait a short while. Then there's the case where they pull up behind, then they are *really* unlikely to run the red (basically going off the road or something similarly abnormal), and that would probably be the situation in a crowded environment given even a relative few honoring the signals.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Maybe, but it was a very short time ago when we still had Christian terrorism ("oh, but those weren't real Christians, they don't count!"). And it's not a big stretch of the imagination to see it again in the future. Anywhere there is an insurgency or civil war, you're often going to see one side claim that it's because of their religion, mostly because people can't separate ethnicity/culture from their religion.
Because they're in a crowd, a really densely packed crowd. They might see that the crowd up ahead of them has slowed down but the people ten, twenty or a thousand meters behind them haven't. So the guys behind them keep pushing forward, and if you try to stop you'll be knocked down and walked over yourself. That is if the pressure of the mass of bodies doesn't crush you to death.
Add panic to that, even if only a few people do, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
If people didn't have religion, they'd find some other excuse to bash each other's heads in. Do you really think any of those "leader" gives half a shit about Allah, God or some other sky daddy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not all nations have this problem. Indonesia has been cited as the largest Muslim nation, but its people don't seem to have been caught-up in either the religious fervor or in the stereotypes normally associated with Turk, Arab, or Persian people, or the rest of south Asia.
On the other hand, I don't think that religious insanity is ever very far away from any group. We see it leak-out from time to time in the United States and in Europe even most people in these places feel they're beyond it. The Balkan Wars are proof enough of that, people that had been peaceful neighbors for years killed each other even though no one benefited from it. I have no doubt that there are otherwise-functional people that in the right circumstances would attempt to kill me over my religious views even though they stand nothing to lose through my views.
That's my biggest problem with how the Wor on Terrah has been handled, instead of showing how base and petty and low these people are by simply trying them, convicting them, and throwing them in jail like any other murderers and thugs we elevate them by making their actions somehow different. Just throw 'em to the system like any other criminal and move on.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Well, when you've got a Five Man Electrical Band to protect, a sign obviously isn't going to cut it...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The problem with the war on terror, is that it made no attempt to resolve underlying issues.
Everyone was calm and patient, as I imagine they are 99.999% of the time at the Hajj. But from the BBC article:
(This is nowhere near the Kaaba, where pilgrims circle around the stone, and where a lot of crowd-control research has been done.) At light densities, columns of people can cross easily and elegantly, such as at a pedestrian crossing. At high densities, it would become physically impossible to make (push) one’s way through a column moving at right angles, with this happening just as people lose their autonomy. With pressure coming in from behind it would become deadly.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Did I say Christianity was any better? I don't care what the age of consent "laws" say, any civilized culture will not allow 9 year olds to be banged, especially by those who are considered "holy". But then again, sky friends and child molestation seem to go hand in hand.
Monstar L
As the world's human population will increase from the current 7 Billion to over 12 Billion within 50 years, large scale gathering, whether it be religious ceremonies, sporting events, musical festivals political carnivals, protests and/or riots will take place, and more people will be trampled to death in stampede
As long as the humans still behave like pack animals, and as long as the designated gathering venues such as Mecca fail to expand to accommodate the vastly increase number of participants, you can count on even worse disasters to happen
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If they have no problem trampling on people, why would they have a problem with ignoring a computer telling them to speed up or slow down?
The first part of that statement shows ignorance of big crowds. If you have ever been in a large crowd you know that when the crowd starts moving, you have no choice, you go with it. If there is something, or someone, on the ground you walk over it because you have absolutely no choice in the matter. I've been in dangerous crowd situations twice in my life, once at a rock concert and once at a post soccer game party. It's very scary and I have no problem at all understanding how people get trampled or crushed. It has nothing to with people not caring about their fellow man. I have to agree with the second part, I doubt any instructions would help once it gets past the tipping point.
As long as the humans still behave like pack animals, and as long as the designated gathering venues such as Mecca fail to expand to accommodate the vastly increase number of participants, you can count on even worse disasters to happen
That's why you shouldn't fence them in. The problem starts when you block the path. Just put the whole damn thing out in the open where people can move.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I can think of two major acts of genocide ordered by self professed "God Fearing Christians" in the past 100 years. At least one bombing comes to mind as well as a few mass shootings.
Only one? Take a look at "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland and surroundings from about 1968 to 1998. (And related events in the centuries leading up to that.) Sure, there was a large political component too ... as there is in the Middle East. I'd wager that anyone old enough to remember those times was a lot more worried about IRA bombs then than Islamic ones today (and with good reason).
-- Alastair
McVeigh's motivation was political, not religious. And somehow it's easy to look at his cause and say: well, he did have a point!
He said it was revenge for Waco and Ruby Ridge. Stop editing things.
Right. He didn't like the political leanings and policies of the people who were involved in the deaths in those places. His revenge was against what he perceived as oppressors, not religious antagonists.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
How about in English? For the few remaining here.
Well, this story is about people who understand mainly Bahasa Indonesian, Urdu, Arabic, Turkic languages, Farsi and so on. So it's okay for English to be a low priority here /troll
I'm just going to say: if I'm in a dense crowd and the only alternatives are moving forward or getting knocked over, I'm going to move forward too.
I don't think rock-star crowdsurfing would work very well. And even if it did, now you're got two layers of congestion.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Umm... Assuming a proper emergency plan is in place (a big assumption) and that it is followed you certainly can have someone directing without knowing the larger events - so long as they all follow a set of rules for a given situation. Whilst my career was largely based on vehicular traffic we did expand into pedestrian traffic modeling as well - compute resources advanced and made this realistic. So, while it's an appeal to authority I do submit that I am an authority. Albeit a tired one.
Basically, you have trained staff with a set of criteria - if this happens direct traffic this way and in this manner. If shit hits the fan don't run for the hills, direct traffic towards unknown emergency exits or ignored emergency exits.
Now, in a true catastrophe this isn't going to be 100% effective - it never is. There is nothing to be done about that. However, proper policies and throughput designs can, and has, saved lives in the exact situation you seem to be discounting. If the event staff know how to manage traffic and where to direct it then they needn't know the entire scope of the disaster to affect the outcome.
I'm tired so, please, forgive me for being short. Hopefully that is neither condescending nor inarticulate.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
A way to stop giant bags of mostly water from gaining destructive momentum is to add structures which limit how much energy is allowed to accumulate before such energy is harmlessly limited by an obstruction. The way to fix this isn't removing barriers it is adding them... lots and lots and lots and lots of them. With many thousands of stampede deaths the only acceptable solution should be an inherently safe one rather than depending on everyone following instructions.
Thinking people will respond to whatever signals you are piping out in the exceptional but predictable instances when fear takes over a crowd is idiotic in and of itself. The only worse thing I can imagine would be to leverage such delusions as an excuse to enable you to "safely" cram in even more.
It is amazon how soon we forget.
But we have you to re-kindle our memories.
they did it more subtly by calling people heretics and hanging them, witch hunting, inquisitions, stoning to death, death for apostasy etc etc.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Clearly you've never been in a crowd stampede. I have, at a festival about 15 years ago,. Nobody *wants* to trample or be trampled, its the panic that sets into the crowd that starts turning thousands of individually rational responses ("flee the danger") into a very irrational crowd ("lets all run into each other"). Nobody is individually making a decision against their own interest or against others interest, its just whats happens when a lot of those decisions collide with each other.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Hitler was baptised and confirmed a Catholic. Some consider that Christian, and some don't. However, he was not religiously driven. In adulthood he was disainful of Christianity. Only a mental defective would see any compatibility between Hitler's philosophy with the teachings of Jesus. The most you can say is that Hitler never publicly and formally repudiated the Church, nor was he excommunicated (which latter is itself damning, but off point).
Goebbels wrote that Hitler "hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity." Scholars agree that Hitler was anti-Christian. But he was opportunistic and pragmatic, and took care never to be seen as atheistic.
Alfred Rosenberg, the appointed Nazi ideologist, rejected and scorned Christianity and embraced paganism and mysticism. He planned that the Bible would be banned and replaced on the altars with Mein Kampf, and the cross replaced with the swastika. A National Reich Church of Germany would take over all churches.
Research with primary sources is good. Now learn to tell the difference between opportunism and facile writing, and actual motivation and conduct.
edit edit edit edit
Interesting how you cannot actually address the substance of the matter, but only stamp your feet and say that word. Typical cowardly ad hominem argument, trying to impune the motive of the person to whom you're responding, instead of addressing the matter directly.
We have plenty of evidence that his attacks were essentially political. Among other things, because he SAID SO. You are trying to imply that it was a "Christian" attack, but of course you cannot actually back that up, and so you're attacking the people who provide information that goes against your phony narrative. Why are you afraid of the facts?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's impossible to be elected to high office if you are not a Christian. There is also scary stuff like the Pledge of Allegiance which includes the phrase "one nation under God" and is forced on children. It's a religious country, even if there is officially separation between church and state.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They did in the simulator I used to play around with.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?