gdm (Slashdot reader #97,336) writes:
A study published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives investigates how ants avoid traffic jams…. Quoting the abstract: “The results show that ants adopt specific traffic strategies (platoon formation, quasi-constant speed and no overtaking maneuvers) that help avoid jam phenomena, even at high density.”

“Researchers are now studying these insects’ cooperative tactics to learn how to program self-driving cars that don’t jam up,” writes Scientific American:

“We’re maximizing the interests of individuals, [which] is why, at a given point, you start to have a traffic jam,” says study co-author Nicola Pugno, who studies sustainable engineering at the University of Trento in Italy. But self-driving cars, if they one day become ubiquitous, could have more cooperative programming. In one vision of this future, autonomous vehicles would share information with nearby cars to optimize traffic flow — perhaps, the researchers suggest, by prioritizing constant speeds and headways or by not passing others on the road…

Today’s drivers can learn at least one thing from ants to avoid causing a traffic jam, says Katsuhiro Nishinari [a mathematical physicist at the University of Tokyo, who studies traffic]: don’t tailgate. By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown “phantom” traffic jam with no obvious cause. “Just keeping away,” he says, can help traffic flow smoothly.
In the article the researchers admit there are differences between humans stuck in traffic and ants. “Unlike cars, ants don’t crash; they can literally walk over one another.” And if they’re backed up in a tunnel, “they’ll find a way to walk on the ceiling!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Philosophy/ethics professor Troy Jollimore looks at the implications of a world where many students are submitting AI-generated essays. (“Sometimes they will provide quotations, giving page numbers that, as often as not, do not seem to correspond to anything in the actual world…”) Ideally if the students write the essays themselves, “some of them start to feel it. They begin to grasp that thinking well, and in an informed manner, really is different from thinking poorly and from a position of ignorance. That moment, when you start to understand the power of clear thinking, is crucial.

“The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely.”

One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all. I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course…
It’s other things too… The students who beg you to reconsider the zero you gave them in order not to lose their scholarship. (I want to say to them: Shouldn’t that scholarship be going to ChatGPT?â) It’s also, and especially, the students who look at you mystified. The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don’t we instructors understand that today’s students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.

Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish — indeed, it sometimes intensifies — when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don’t equate education with job training.

What do you mean? they might then ask.

And I say: I’m not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life…

My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself — and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age…. As I go on, I find that more of the time, energy, and resources I have for teaching are dedicated to dealing with this issue. I am doing less and less actual teaching, more and more policing. Sometimes I try to remember the last time I actually looked forward to walking into a classroom. It’s been a while.

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Slashdot covered the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in 2008 and 2010 — though it’s been running since 1983. Entrants competed to write the worst-possible first sentence for a novel, in a contest started by English professor Scott E. Rice at San Jose State University (which sponsored the contest). In its first year it drew over 10,000 entries!

Over the years the bad first sentences were even collected into actual books (that were edited by Rice). But after 43 years, Rice delivered his own disappointing first sentence. “It is with deep regrets that I announce the conclusion of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.”
Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor!

When I initiated the competition in 1983, inviting entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels, I never dreamed that we would receive thousands of entrants from all over the U.S. and the globe, or that the contest would survive for over four decades.

I am especially grateful to our entrants for keeping the contest alive and to our Panel of Undistinguished Judges who dutifully selected each year’s “winners.” And, of course, I would like to thank my daughter, EJ, who has been indispensable the last several years of the contest. It’s been 42 good years but, alas, all good things must come to an end. Rest assured we’re keeping the BLFC spirit alive by maintaining our archive for posterity so that generations and generations hence may witness your greatness!
His daughter EJ added their own words of thanks:
Lastly, any little bit you could spare towards helping us keep the archive going (a few bucks is great!) would be greatly appreciated (EJ’s Venmo is @elizabeth-rice-12). Thank you so much for your joy and enthusiasm — the noble Bulweriers have made working on the contest a treasure!!

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