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A threshold guardian is often just a guy in the slow lane of the story appointing themselves traffic police. Like those truckers who decide to straddle merging lanes to enforce “fairness” when a full capacity zipper merge would in fact be more efficient.
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I understand (I think) how it'd be optimal efficiency if robots are driving/coordinating, but with humans I imagine the efficiency is lost to additional disruption in flow. Bandwidth through the choke point is maximized if flow is fastest.
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The book references a paper. I don’t think human factor matters since it cancels out in both merge patterns, leaving net inefficiency of extra length of unoccupied lane causing backup to extend longer etc. And even if batch merges are better, blocking is still meaningless.
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Yeah this is why I'm curious to visualize an example, not just of the zipper but also of the less efficient alternative. I'm not sure what it's up against. (Agreed blocking lanes isn't productive.)
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