Chaos

[d.wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk]

It seems almost too apposite to be true, but the following article appears in
the current issue of New Scientist (10 Feb 1996, p.11).  It seems there is now
scientific proof that crowd-chaos holds underlying order.

(To experience the full impact, for "rock concert" read "Holi", for "Wembly
Stadium" read "Allahabad", etc.)


Rock fans go with the flow
=====================

The crowd at a rock concert may look like a seething mass of bodies, but there
is a hidden order at work.  The discovery that crowd behaviour is not entirely
chaotic was made by Keith Still of the University of Warwick, Patrick Carr,
operations manager at Wembly Stadium, and Mark Briggs, director of event
Security, a company that provides security at rock concerts.

In the past, Still has used virtual reality to model the beaviour of small
groups of people leaving burning buildings.  He turned his attention to larger
groups after noticing the same patterns cropping up time and time again in
videos of crowd movements.  Now he has distilled the behaviour of up to a
million people into a few simple rules and ten lines of computer code.  Making
thousands of computer-generated people obey these rules produces patterns like
the one pictured above [symmetrical, flower-like image].  "We create a virtual
environment that reflects the geometry of teh venue and then let the people find
their optimum route through it," says Still.

He says the model proved itself by accurately predicting how long it would take
a 20,000-strong crowd watching Bon Jovi at Wembly to leave the stadium at the
end of the concert.  The research team has formed a company to offer modelling
software to other venues looking for the best way to clear crowds after events.


--
Dominik Wujastyk