← Cabinet of Emergence

Cabinet of emergence — specimen 06

Traffic flow — the Nagel-Schreckenberg model

One lane, a loop, no crashes, no lane changes, no bottleneck anywhere in the rule. Each car: speed up if the road's clear, slow down if you're closing in on the car ahead, and a small random chance of tapping the brakes for no reason at all. That's it. The question: as the road fills up, does traffic flow taper off smoothly, or does it break the way Schelling's segregation and the sandpile did — fine, fine, fine, then a cliff?

Live specimen · 150-cell ring · vmax 5

Ready.

0.15
0.30

Field journal

0 measurements logged this session

Avg velocity
Flow

Flow = density × average speed. Watching whether it rises, peaks, then falls off smoothly — or snaps.