From the University of Nagoya, in Negoya, Japan comes an interesting experiment that NewScientist released to video: a simulation of a traffic jam.

The University simply told 22 drivers to cruise around at a constant 30 kmph, in a circle. At first, the cars were both equidistant and moving constantly. They found, however, that little variations eventually caused the traffic to jam up and created a shockwave of slow moving vehicles that moved backwards along the circle at around 20kmph – similar to traffic jams that are observed in real life.

The experiment has often been simulated in computer models but never run full-scale. What’s interesting is that if they had robots running the experiment, the jam would not be able to occur – it takes human error to cause the fluctuations in behavior necessary to trigger the shockwave jam.

Network traffic follows different rules than motor traffic; but again, human error can lead to “shockwave jamming” as well – which is why you’d find that the most critical traffic is often the most “robot-controlled.” Human beings do not choose the bitrate of most VoIP conversations, for example. Web browsing, on the other hand, has human beings “choosing” how much bandwidth to take – whether to watch the high-def YouTube video, the standard-def YouTube video, or to not watch the YouTube video at all.

This is not to say that misconfiguration issues can’t cause problems, but to suggest that problems with network congestion might be caused by a single, human, user. Again – this is why many companies choose to sequester the “humans” away from the business critical stuff.