What about Doc in siege? I don’t feel like he’s a bottom.

Exactly. The point it was making is that perfect top-down coordination takes a ton of resources for a whole lotta nothing.

PRT is kinda like this, but they don’t link together.

I was slightly wrong. From page 237 of Algorithms to Live By, The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, further referencing the paper How Bad is Selfish Routing? by Roughgarden and Tardos, it says that

“…the “selfish routing” approach [of cars] has a price of anarchy that’s a mere 4/3. That is, a free-for-all is only 33% worse than perfect top-down coordination.”

Anyways, the way they got to that number is mathematical game theory. In this case people will choose the fastest route which happens to not be so bad.

It’s also very possible that what they’re concluding is significantly abstracted, but I haven’t read the source reference to know for sure.

I read in a book that the current system of drivers acting on their own without something coordinating their every move is actually 75% as efficient as a fully coordinated system.

Therefore, the benefit obtained with all people using self driving cars is nothing compared to just improving public transit or improving car infrastructure.

Me too, I started my download almost immediately after being notified.