I happen to travel daily on a tolled highway and this has afforded me some insight into the way vehicles move on it.
To the uninitiated in graphics simulating a highway with vehicles of all sizes would seem trivial.
A Question:
A question occurred to me about how could a vehicle try to minimize its travel time?
Observations:
Heavy vehicles struggle to climb an uphill and it also depends on whether the truck is carrying goods or not. Under such circumstances other passenger vehicles cannot get passage if the slow moving vehicles block the way.
Another observation is travel time depends not only on the top speed of your vehicle but also on the speed and position of other vehicles on the way and this is something that cannot be predicted.
Your own vehicle sometimes moves faster and sometimes slower depending on road conditions. Racing car fans know very well how fractions of a second matter in a win or loss.
The solution:
The vehicles going on the road would do better for themselves if they stick to certain policies. These rules of driving do not originate from safety or traffic rule considerations but from game theory. What might be the form of such rules? Why would they help you while driving on a highway? Are there vast number of such rules, all of which you could never remember and more importantly would, not obeying them lead to any penalties in travel time.
I have read that in game theory a zero sum game is one where losses made by a player are exactly the gains made by the other and vice-versa. In a zero sum game which is also called strictly competitive game, solutions are usually found by the minimax algorithm a technique which assigns a score to each player and tries to attain maximum score for "the" player as opposed to the competitor under any circumstance.
I have in mind making an unbeatable tic-tac-toe game of 3x3 or 4x4 or 5x5 and this blog post originated from that thought.
