Sunday, March 14, 2010

Reaction Ti me

I haven't complained about one of my favorite subject for quite a while. Why is it that cars can't be automated. It's an awesome responsibility to allow people to share the roads. And I'm afraid that many people are just not taking this seriously enough. I can't understand why this whole driving thing has not been taken out of our hands. According to the font of all knowledge, wikipedia, the mean response for a college student to respond to visual stimulus is 190 milliseconds (160 milliseconds for auditory stimulus). College age is when our responses are supposed to be at their height (I assume this must be before all the beer and drugs). To be generous this equates to around 7 reactions a second. A slow microprocessor today is say around 1 GHZ. Lets be conservative and assume it takes 100,000 clock cycles (one hundred thousand cycles) for a system to react to stimulus. It could still react one thousand five hundred times faster than a human. (1GHZ/1E5 = 10,000/7 = 1428).

The time has come - so what's the holdup? O.K. and if you don't like the computer controlled car idea, why are cars not on rails? There is just too much free choice.

Oh, and happy PI day. Here is Pi to the 10,000th digit.

2 comments:

Haflo said...

well bugs ?

blackpetero said...

And there are no bugs in humans? You could image that you would start with driver assisted control - I think you can get some of this already with mobileye. But I want it all and everywhere!