Traffic Control
My review of the “What the bleep” panel is coming…I’m just a little frantic with other things at the moment! One of them is this neat little Traffic Control game. It’s pretty simple, and a little boring to start with, but it does highlight the difficulties of how you should set your traffic light settings.
It would be really interesting if you could program some of the lights automatically, and try and work out the optimal pattern. Or, better yet, if you could set up some sort of genetic algorithm or neural network, and see if it could learn what the best solution was. Of course, you’d need to decide on your most important variables then. I expect that total traffic flow (which increases during the game), cars waiting at the red light and, of course, location of the traffic light would be most important, and this is reflected in real life by sensors that detect when you’re waiting at the light. But it would also be good to include the state of lights around you as well, which is also reflected in real life by lights which are synchronised to give you a good run.
Anyway, my first-time score was 181 
On a related topic, apparently the models for traffic flow on a highway give the ideal average speed as around 30km/h. Ideal here means the speed which will give the most total flux. Not that any government will ever get elected by promising to reduce speed limits to 40km/h, but that’s what the numbers say.