Interesting project! I had fun playing with it. I wanted to test the theory (which I saw in an article posted here on HN a few weeks ago) that a single car slowing right down on a busy highway (e.g. to avoid hitting an animal on the road or similar) can actually cause a traffic jam that goes back miles and can last for hours.
I couldn't prove that hypothesis at this scale. I am assuming that the AI drivers have just too good a reaction time and they can co-ordinate their speeds to each other to keep things moving along fairly nicely. A thumbs up for robot driverless cars, I guess ;-)
EDIT: Actually, playing some more - it does prove it to some extent. If you increase reaction time to ~800ms and let the traffic blitz along at a steady clip, then slow down two cars side by side to almost a stop, then after the initial cascade of accidents, it take ages for the traffic to get back to the same steady pace. Interesting.
I couldn't prove that hypothesis at this scale. I am assuming that the AI drivers have just too good a reaction time and they can co-ordinate their speeds to each other to keep things moving along fairly nicely. A thumbs up for robot driverless cars, I guess ;-)
EDIT: Actually, playing some more - it does prove it to some extent. If you increase reaction time to ~800ms and let the traffic blitz along at a steady clip, then slow down two cars side by side to almost a stop, then after the initial cascade of accidents, it take ages for the traffic to get back to the same steady pace. Interesting.