Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can be predicted
Comments
bad_haircut72
thih9
Some proximity seems desired. If people didn’t want to be near rampaging bulls, they wouldn’t have attended the festival.
vasco
Just like a spring. When far they want to get near, when near they want to get far away.
brendoelfrendo
Hm, new research topic: the Running of the Bulls as a prototype for rally racing fans.
_boffin_
I don’t know about that… some of the clips I’ve seen of rally racing fans, they get closer when they’re already close.
TeMPOraL
And this is how we arrive at a Boids model for human crowds.
Simon_O_Rourke
I hereby award an Ignoble prize for this work.
dieselgate
The posted article doesn’t talk about relationship/proximity to bulls directly. More like a large gathering of people in a plaza and is compared to another festival in Germany.
The parent comment sounds funny but is not directly relevant to the content of the article.
loloquwowndueo
Ignoble was probably an autocowreck: it should be “Ig Nobel”. https://improbable.com/ig/winners/?amp=1
psychoslave
So, that's all very interesting. Do we also have some studies on how to avoid gathering people in such z dense level that all possibilities of that kind of dramatic outcome can occurs.
Also note that not all crowds are the same. I went to some metal concerts where the moves would exhibits very different moves, including less packed and steal, split in in very highly packed borders before an abrupt run and merge, as well as creating protection circle around someone who falls on the ground. I actually didn't witnessed any major crowd incident in such a concert, so I would be interested to have statistics about outcomes of a crowd panic in a metal concert vs in a cinema for example.
jrootabega
Seems to me that formal studies would have more of an effect looking at how to manage crowds that are already too dense without making things worse. If you want to avoid the density in the first place, you decide on a maximum density within a central perimeter, and also manage density appropriately along the ingress routes. That way you don't just push the unsafe densities into the outer side of the perimeter. And you set your desired densities low enough to both avoid dangerous situations inside the central perimeter, and allow the central crowd to get out if there is a fire/etc. inside it.
Essentially if you want a max density in area A, you enforce some other max densities in the area several times larger than A.
bobthepanda
I would imagine that if anyone has done the work to study this, it’s the Saudis for the Hajj, since they are managing the largest human migration to a single point. (I believe there are larger migrations like China’s Lunar New Year, but those are more diffuse since it’s more people to hometowns.)
dpig_
Studies will also no doubt be done on the currently unfolding Maha Kumbh Mela in India, which has to be breaking some records for largest human gathering.
bobthepanda
I admittedly don’t know very much about that festival.
One interesting thing about Hajj is that not only is travel to a specific place mandated but also travel in a specific path and direction; you need to walk around the Kaaba seven times and walking between the hills of Safa and Marwah seven times.
Given the Kaaba is only 12m x 10.5m its a very small place to concentrate people in.
ses1984
If you can have a circle pit then the density is probably less than 9 people per square meter.
taurknaut
Crowd density is certainly the key here. Over a certain density crowds move like a liquid. Under a certain density crowds get much more difficult to model.
This is not new in any way, btw. This paper seems to specifically address the running of the bulls.
eleveriven
But if anything, this study at least shows that we're getting closer to understanding and managing the dangers of large, dense crowds in a way that can actually be applied
mettamage
That video is really illuminating in the article. I've experienced it once at the entrance of a concert. If you have all kinds of forces acting on you, then you don't have much autonomy on how you move.
Would this to some extent be how actual fluid (e.g. water) move as well? I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there from one side of the liquid to the other side.
soulofmischief
Drop some oil or food coloring into some water and swish it around!
fc417fc802
Yes, liquids are similar to what you describe. Although the forces are quite a bit more complex than just being packed into a tight space.
> I thought atoms just freely flowed around in there
That is how gasses are. Although in that case there are lots of high speed elastic collisions happening.
jumploops
Something something psychohistory
paulddraper
In Asimov’s Foundation series, a scientist Harry Seldon combines physiology, sociology, and statistics to create psychohistory.
This allows him to predict planetary + galactic scale events, including a surprising and imminent regression of humanity into a new Dark Age.
jagged-chisel
Felt a lot like self-fulfilling prophecy when I read the series. Too many people were aware of the predictions.
db48x
It’s because there was no iteration. There was only one attempt to actually use the discovery to influence society. There should have been at least one smart bad guy who used knowledge of psychohistory to search for conditions that would favor his preferred outcomes over Seldon’s.
There’s a smarter treatment of the idea in the John C. Wright’s “Count to the Eschaton” series.
bobthepanda
This is also eventually a plot point in Westworld.
paulddraper
??
Do you not the know the Second Foundation?
NineStarPoint
The second foundation was also made by Harry Seldon though, there wasn't a completely separate force that attempted to change history using his research.
db48x
Correct. Meanwhile in the “Count to the Eschaton” series, all the bad guys know enough of psychohistory to do a lot of damage. The future does not at all go according to the plan made by the good guys, and as time goes on a greater and greater percentage of the population knows and employs the mathematics of psychohistory in their daily lives.
In fact, that mathematics turns out to be much more widely applicable than mere Psychohistory, since it applies to all systems of all types and purposes, not just human societies. A small system like a web server is simple enough that you or I can confidently predict its eventual failure; the hardware simply doesn’t last forever so eventually a disk will fail or a capacitor will pop or whatever. But the company running the web server is a much more complex system that is much harder to predict. Does the company fail if it pivots to a different market and turns off the web server? Or if the cleaning lady unplugs it once a week to vacuum? If you want that particular web server, or the pages it serves, to last forever then you really have to design that corporation well. You don't want it to divert from the plans you gave it when the market changes and there is more profit to be made elsewhere. In fact to keep that web server running over the long term you really might have to design the society around it so that the situation _doesn’t_ change too much. Society will keep changing as fads come and go and people are born and die, but you want it to always orbit a chaotic attractor of your choosing in the phase space of possible societies.
The series takes this idea to its logical extreme, giving the main characters access to and control over larger and larger systems until they are controlling vast galactic superclusters. The degree to which the many myriad intelligences, human and otherwise, in those vast systems can carry out the main character’s purposes over deep time depends on how well the rules they have devised work and how well those intelligences understand and implement them.
paulddraper
Ah I see.
To be fair, the Foundation series it takes literally centuries for events to play out.
A lot of self-interested motives would not be well served by that timeframe.
db48x
I am not sure that I agree. Can you elaborate? Perhaps you mean that a story intended to play out over centuries might get bogged down every time someone tried to make himself king? I think the Count to the Eschaton series has an obvious counterexample to that, but you might mean something else.
paulddraper
That doesn’t really matter, does it?
The premise was that even being aware of the impending collapse was not enough to stop it.
xyzsparetimexyz
No need to explain the reference.
solarengineer
There are many who have not yet read the Foundation series.
RestartKernel
I appreciated it.
egberts1
Like what I witnessed with ants in my childhood ant farms.
Ant farm is the kind where dirt/sand is poured in between two glass panes and you watch them build tunnels and watch the ants interact with various things you drop inside it).
alwa
See also the submission of the paper itself
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42987646
(6 days ago, 92 points, 41 comments)
talideon
Isn't this what Navier-Stokes is for, or am I misunderstanding things? Does this improve on it in some way not clear from the article?
dieselgate
It’s not clear to me either. I’ve heard for a long time - including in undergrad fluid mechanics - how large groups of humans can be modeled via fluid mech equations. But this article seems to provide more robust evidence of these occurrences IRL. It more draws parallels between the oscillations seen in crowds in Pamplona and another large gathering in Germany. Which have similar flow properties.
It also seems to specify the density with which these properties emerge
staplung
I feel like the headline is seriously misleading. The TL;DR is basically "the authors observed pockets of several hundred people spontaneously behaving like one fluid that oscillated" over an 18 second period. That hardly seems to amount to "predicting crowd movements" in any meaningful sense.
eleveriven
It'd be interesting to see how this research could be used in real-time to guide emergency response teams or adjust crowd flow during large-scale events
itronitron
There has been a lot of research, and civil engineering presumably, to manage crowds for the Hajj pilgrimage at Mecca.
submeta
Isn‘t this old news? There is research that says that if x percent of a group moves in one direction, the rest will predictably follow. Swarm study reveals this. And this can be observerd in human crowds as well.
I was wondering if Crypto whales use this insight to create FOMO and make them buy shitcoins in their pump and dump schemes.
firtoz
You may have something interesting here...
If we represent:
- the "price is rising or falling" as "a bull is approaching"
- a combination of percentage stake + your buy price as "how close you are to the bull" (as in, how much you'd be impacted)
- a sell action as "running in a particular direction"
and so on, then that could perhaps be a decent model?
taneq
One might assume that such a system would be more active in a bear market than a bull market. ;)
firtoz
Hmm... so we need to also simulate climbing trees (for some bear markets) and playing dead (for other bear markets) as well as running away and punching the head of the bear.
TheSpiceIsLife
It’s no coincidence there’s a raging bull sculpture on Wall Street.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
Presumably you’re joking, but I wanted to note that this is surely a coincidence.
> The sculpture was created by Italian artist Arturo Di Modica in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. Late in the evening of Thursday, December 14, 1989, Di Modica arrived on Wall Street with Charging Bull on the back of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the New York Stock Exchange Building.
Talanes
I wouldn't call that entirely coincidental. Di Modica picked a bull because it was a well understood metaphor for market optimism. The bull-run analogy, while not being central to the financial bull concept, has been applied to it plenty.
See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Wa...
taurknaut
Why else would you put a bull in front of the stock exchange except as commentary on assholes pitching bull markets? How could you possibly construe this as a coincidence?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
> assholes pitching bull markets
Totally willing to believe I’m just naive about this; I don’t see what “bull market vs. bear market” has to do with the running of the bulls festival.
taurknaut
I imagine the original use of "bull market" was derived from this practice. If this isn't the case i have no clue myself.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
Yeah, fair enough. Wikipedia has this, which I hadn’t found before:
> The terms come from London's Exchange Alley in the early 18th century, where traders who engaged in naked short selling were called "bear-skin jobbers" because they sold a bear's skin (the shares) before catching the bear. This was simplified to "bears," while traders who bought shares on credit were called "bulls." The latter term might have originated by analogy to bear-baiting and bull-baiting, two animal fighting sports of the time.
TheSpiceIsLife
I replied to a comment about crypto whale pump and dump schemes in a threat about predicting crowd behaviour in reference to running of the bull festival, which happens to be, at least loosely, couple to the idea of a raging bull. Wall St has a raging bull sculpture.
I feel dumber having just written that out. Don't they teach reading comprehension at school any more?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
Unfortunately, I don’t see any words here that describe the relation. I would appreciate if you could point them out to me so I can give my comprehension skills another go.
I predict the crowd runs away from the rampaging bulls