Pioneer Woman writes "Microsoft announced plans to introduce a Web-based service for driving directions that incorporates complex software models to help users avoid traffic jams. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets and will be freely available as part of the company's Live.com site for 72 cities in the United States. The new service will on occasion plan routes that might not be intuitive to a driver and in some cases Clearflow will compute that a trip will be faster if a driver stays on a crowded highway, rather than taking a detour, because side streets are even more backed up by cars that have fled the original traffic jam. The Microsoft researchers designed algorithms that modeled traffic behavior and collecting trip data from Microsoft employees who volunteered to carry GPS units in their cars. In the end they were able to build a model for predicting traffic based on four years of data and 16,500 discrete trips covering over 125,000 miles effectively creating individual "personalities" for over 819,000 road segments in the Seattle region."
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Jams not James probably works better. (Score:1, Funny)
"Home, James - and avoid the traffic, James, with Microsoft Clearflow."