"we heavily biased the network against trains and now it's just saying the optimal car consists of several metal struts connecting just two thinned out wheels that the driver sits on top of and propels themselves using pedals. It was busy redesigning intersections to have clear safe lanes for these bi-cycle 'cars' with plenty of trees / room for pedestrians when we pulled the plug..."

This is just the AI bias showing through: It's all that training.

So what you're saying is the optimal form is some kind of crab train?

Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

Sharing because I was delighted to learn this: trees are also an example of convergent evolution. I'm personally rooting for us to become trees. Pun intended.

Minimum rolling friction by having hard wheels on a hard surface. Minimum wind resistance by making it long and narrow. Minimum stop time by having big doors.

BAM: train.

Well, the automotive industry has been working on making self driving a thing, and I recall when they first tried to tackle the problem of lane keeping.

The first proposal was to embed magnets or similar into the road surface that the car could have a set of sensors for to determine if it was drifting left or right in its lane.

Motherfucker, that's just a virtual track for your dumb four-wheeled mini-train.

It didn't catch on, but AFAIK it was implemented in small areas as a trial and it performed adequately given the technology of the time.

So I'm out here going, why the fuck are we pretending that vehicles are not just rail-free personal trains?

I know it's a shitpost, but i hate that people interpret carcinisation as a crab being the ultimate piece of evolution.

When learning evolution like algorithms in computer science, one of the first things you learn is strategies to not get stuck in locally optimal solutions (solutions that seem the best when you look at other nearby solutions, but are worse than other solutions if you allow your algorithm to look further away).

Crabs seem like that, it's just an easy defensive evolution that then stagnates in a form that kind of works. Seeing how many crabs we eat, and how few crabs eat us, it's obvious that crabs aren't the actual pinnacle of evolution, just some locally optimal solution that evolution tends to get stuck in :p.

Even the slime mould knows it: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/slime-mould-attacks-simulates-tokyo-rail-network

Train cars are crabs. They've got an exoskeleton, they're squat bodied, many legged, and have pincers on either side. All they have to do is start moving that body plan around some and they will be crabs.

More like Carcinistation!

Crab-spotting is completely undervalued as a cultural activity.

the Dutch train system is so incredibly cool, you can get from one end to another end of the 'main' part of the Netherlands in an hour and its so easy to just get to any station anywhere and then you can just go everywhere for so incredibly cheap. Literally the only thing you need to get anywhere in the Netherlands is a bike and something to buy train tickets with. You dont even need to buy tickets, you can just tap your debit card on the gates in the entrance station and then tap it when you exit and it just handles everything for you

Ha! I was thinking along these lines reading science fiction the other day. In every novel where stuff has to get moved overland, it's always a train. No matter their tech level, trains are the simplest, most efficient solution.

There's two kinds of ground transportation: off-roading, and should be a train.

I also really like that every time I see some dumb idea to "improve vehicles" there a long comment chain improving it even further into a train.

Well if every vehicle becomes autonomous then isn't that just a large scaled high speed train?

With how bad semis rut the road I've been wanting to see them with retractable train wheels on the back

If trains were optimal, they'd have pincers.