A few times a week I travel through Utrecht CS (Central Station), one of the busiest train stations in the Netherlands. If you have never been there: the main hall is basically a large, rather open space that is often full of people. As a matter of fact I think CS secretly stands for Crowd Surfing. Well, to transfer trains I need to walk from one end from the station to the other end and most of the time at rush hour. But even when it’s very crowded, I can cross the hall without any problems and even without thinking much about all the other people around me. And so does everybody else. When I first thought about this, it looked to me as if the crowd is organized in some way. As if someone or something is constantly coordinating everyone, creating pathways in all kinds of directions. In a way like: “you go a bit to the left and you’re going to walk behind him, you need to slow down a little, etc.”.

The same goes for the traffic in some very busy cities. If you search for “India driving” at Youtube you see what I mean. If you watch the traffic in this video move from a distance it might seem like there is some top down control. But this is obviously not the case, because there are no traffic lights or something (in this particular video). Still it looks ordered. Where does this behavior come from? How can it be explained? You could simply say that there is something going on that we just don’t understand. But to me that’s not a very satisfying explanation. You could also say that for some magical reason everything goes right. However, most would agree that this is not exactly a scientific valid cause. So what is the answer?

It might be tempting to think that there is one person in charge, but this is not the case. The crowd is not controlled in any way from the top down. Instead the behavior arises from the bottom up. Something that is called emergence. The individuals share some simple rules on which they behave. Like: “don’t smash into each other”. The general behavior of the crowd emerges from the actions controlled by these rules. So there is no central control, there is no magic involved. Oh, one more thing; don’t think too much about emergence when you actually walk at Utrecht CS. It caused me running into others all the time.

tagged with: utrecht, crowd surfing, central station, youtube

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