I came across a couple of neat videos of emergent behavior that I thought might be interesting to discuss together. The first comes from a study of marathons and the dynamics of how the race starts. Typically marathons have large fields such that everyone cannot start running at once; the runners at the front begin, and the “start” moves backwards through the field in a sort of wave. If you’ve never run a marathon, you might be familiar with similar phenomena from other contexts, such as traffic on a freeway. I’ve encountered traffic situations where all the cars are basically stopped, then it seems like things open up and you can move forward for a bit, then everyone comes to a stop again, and so on for a few iterations without any discernible cause for the starting and stopping. If you had a bird’s-eye view, you might be able to understand this traffic pattern as waves of movement traveling backwards from the accident or roadwork creating the congestion. You can see that wave in the marathon videos below (and notice the bridges of the Pittsburgh marathon at the beginning).
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