Minimum rolling friction by having hard wheels on a hard surface. Minimum wind resistance by making it long and narrow. Minimum stop time by having big doors.
BAM: train.
I know it’s a shitpost, but i hate that people interpret carcinisation as a crab being the ultimate piece of evolution.
When learning evolution like algorithms in computer science, one of the first things you learn is strategies to not get stuck in locally optimal solutions (solutions that seem the best when you look at other nearby solutions, but are worse than other solutions if you allow your algorithm to look further away).
Crabs seem like that, it’s just an easy defensive evolution that then stagnates in a form that kind of works. Seeing how many crabs we eat, and how few crabs eat us, it’s obvious that crabs aren’t the actual pinnacle of evolution, just some locally optimal solution that evolution tends to get stuck in :p.
We will see (or not) who has the last laugh, crabs or homo sapiens sapiens?
Sharing because I was delighted to learn this: trees are also an example of convergent evolution. I’m personally rooting for us to become trees. Pun intended.
This is just the AI bias showing through: It’s all that training.
“we heavily biased the network against trains and now it’s just saying the optimal car consists of several metal struts connecting just two thinned out wheels that the driver sits on top of and propels themselves using pedals. It was busy redesigning intersections to have clear safe lanes for these bi-cycle ‘cars’ with plenty of trees / room for pedestrians when we pulled the plug…”
Even in bike racing the optimal form ends being to become a train. A peloton is just a train made up of bikes.
And then imagine if instead of wheels a bicycle was on a track with even greater reduced rolling resistance than skinny overinflated tires and didn’t require lumbar strength for balance.
Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
Well, the automotive industry has been working on making self driving a thing, and I recall when they first tried to tackle the problem of lane keeping.
The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.
Motherfucker, that’s just a virtual track for your dumb four-wheeled mini-train.
It didn’t catch on, but AFAIK it was implemented in small areas as a trial and it performed adequately given the technology of the time.
So I’m out here going, why the fuck are we pretending that vehicles are not just rail-free personal trains?
Self driving taxis aren’t an awful solution for last-mile transport. Trains can’t take you door to door, and walking isn’t always a good option (people with mobility issues, inclement weather, etc).
Key word being “taxis”. They don’t need to be in every individual’s garage.
