Sometimes, people traveling on a road that runs into a traffic jam is not motivated not by works on public roads, either by accident or by an influx of vehicles greater than normal. After a while, these phantom jams end as mysteriously as it began.

One line of research, which now the University of Bristol has begun work on a new project and found that although most of the changes in vehicle speed and its position on the road are absorbed by the flow of traffic, sometimes combined in a “perfect storm” to create these phantom jams.

In dense traffic conditions, the action of a single driver who crosses a rail car to another is enough to cause a “small snowball that grows as it spreads from the vehicles driving behind into a” great snowball that ends with a traffic jam. (more…)

A team of researchers has designed a new type of random number generator, encrypted communications and other uses, which is cryptographically secure, private and randomness inherently guaranteed by the laws of physics.

That’s important because randomness is surprisingly rare. Although events in the course of everyday life may seem random and arbitrary, none is truly random, as all could be predicted with knowledge of the appropriate. In fact, it is almost impossible to achieve true randomness.

This situation leads to a constant concern among cryptographers, who need to encrypt valuable data and messages using a long string of random numbers that form a “key” to encode and decode the information.

For practical purposes, the encoders typically employ various mathematical algorithms called pseudo-random number generators, which are approaching the ideal situation as much as possible. But it never be complete assurance that the system used to produce these strings of numbers is invulnerable to attackers, nor that a seemingly random sequence is not predictable in any way. (more…)

The economic crisis that has beaten the United States and other nations have made rivers of ink, economists and other experts say those responsible for the financial calamity. Although the causes of the crisis now making clear, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory are trying to create new computer models on the behavior of the economy that will allow those responsible for large-scale strategizing have more realistic views of different types markets, so they can better prevent future economic disasters.

Traditional economic models rely heavily on models that do not take into account the decision-making processes of investors and individual clients. Therefore, these models do not represent the real internal dynamics of the market, as noted by Charles Macal, a scientist at Argonne systems. (more…)

It is a toy that most kids have ever played, but the results of Gene Cooperman, a professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University, and his colleague Dan Kunkle, not the work of a child. Both have shown that 26 moves suffice to solve any configuration of a Rubik’s Cube, a new record. Historically, the best result shown looked 27 moves.

Cooperman and Kunkle were able to achieve this new record through two primary techniques, used 7 terabytes of distributed disk as an extension of RAM memory in order to hold some large tables and developed a new way to ultra-fast computing and movements, and even groups full of movement, using the mathematical theory of groups. (more…)