Optimal driving --- a game theoritic situation.

Driving in Bangalore :

Different people have different opinion about driving in Bangalore. In this blog i wish to provide my view and my observations about driving at Bangalore.

Some people like to drive and some do not. Some like to drive fast some don't. Every one have their own style. But I have noticed one common observation which I wish to explain below.

Everybody likes the road to be free or atleast wish to go without traffic jams. All of us want to reach our destination with the least waiting time in traffic. So what happens ....
Our driving and time to reach the destination does not only depend on our driving but also on others' driving whom we come across.

Ok ... all right, let me speak about violating/not-violating traffic.

Manual traffic handling has become almost a must in situations like bangalore traffic. Most of the times if left unattended, by the traffic police, leads to unnecessary queue on the roads.

Automated traffic lights are not intelligent enough to manage the traffic properly. Equal priority is given, and is not sensitive to the amount of traffic lying at that instant. So with the above situation, any person on this earth is suppose to loose his peace of mind waiting in the long traffic. Many times, person feels like violating the traffic to avoid this restless feeling.

So one of the best ways to have peace of mind on the bangalore traffic is to engage ourselves in other activities, while driving, and forget that we are driving ... !!!!. Certainly not to the extent of causing another mess by hitting someone nearby ... :).

So to tell you, all of us individually want to move faster, which depends on others. If a biker is taken as an example, he tries to pierce in as much as possible, and does it until the stage where he would not be able to do it any more!!!. And most of the times even the other biker also tries to do the same thing and both will have to suddenly stop !!!. Though the same is the case with car-drivers and bus-drivers, each one would be at their respective levels competing with their correspondingly sized vehicles !!! .

In fact, one drivers faster by blocking others. Sometimes this is to such an extent that no one would move faster on the whole (loose - loose situation).

Just viewing the same in Game Theory terms -

Game Theory --> It is a science/study of situations which are similar to games. Here i wish to tell you that driving especially in bangalore is a nice example of game-theory. Please google for Game-Theory to know more about it.

I will brief about it in short. As said it is the study of game-type situations and which is in turn used to handle other game-type situations desired.

Some of the characteristics and assumptions are as follows :
1) the players of the game are rational, have some common knowledge, have different levels of intelligence.

So when biking is considered,

1. The drivers are the players who compete against each other for a win. Win here means getting to the destination by locally racing the driver present at that time on road.

2. Similarly all drivers are also rational meaning they want to go first and their speed is dependent on the presence of other vehicles.

3. Common knowledge is that every one knows that everyone wants to go first.

4. Different Intelligent levels include the difference in skill sets in various drivers and their expertise in driving. The attitude, traffic violation are the other parameters which play a role over here.

5. So, on the whole one could classify this as a "strategic form Game" where all the players play simultanously with their own set of strategies.