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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!
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.
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”
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.
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
This actually deserves to be modded up - b'cos Muslims have this concept of 'inshallah' - as allah wills - whereby anything bad that happens to them is said to be the will of allah, and is not to be questioned. In fact, I think somewhere in the 90s, after such a stampede, a Saudi minister/royal family member made that very comment - that the deaths were the will of allah. So AC's post, while seemingly tasteless, is hardly inappropriate here.
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.
In many ways it is an abrogation of personal responsibility, and a key problem with many religions, but a part of human nature it would seem.
Silence is a state of mime.