Farmers in Switzerland receive money from their government for letting their cows eat young trees in the Alps. But why? Because this is improving the mountain views for tourists who might return year after year and spend their cash in the country. As the Swiss government wants to wisely spend its money, it is using a computer model of the mountains populated by virtual tourists -- or software agents -- which tirelessly take the same roads again and again and give their appreciation about the best spots. The Economist reports about these virtual tourists in this very cleverly-titled article, "Computer browsers." What will be the next logical step? Pay more the farmers with the strongest potential to improve the views for real tourists? Wrong. Instead, real hikers will be invited to explore the virtual Alps to give their feedback. Their observations will be then integrated into the software managing the virtual travelers. Read more...
Here is the beginning of the article of the Economist.
Do cows improve the view? That is a question which interests the Swiss government, given that it subsidises farmers heavily to graze their cows in the mountains. One justification for the subsidy is that cows eat young trees, and fewer trees mean better vistas of the sort beloved by tourists. But just how much do cows improve the view and where do they provide most value for money?
To help answer these questions, Kai Nagel and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, have developed computer models of the Alps and populated them with virtual tourists (or "autonomous agents" in computer-speak) that can wander the electronic landscape. The agents are programmed to behave, as far as possible, like real tourists, and to record their impressions as they go.
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Here you can see one early model of the Swiss Alps populated by some virtual agents (Credit: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich). |
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And "in this picture some events sent by the agents are shown. Green means that the agent likes the forest he's in, blue stands for a beautiful view. Red events, however, are sent if an agent does not feel comfortable because the place he is at is too crowded." (Credit: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich). |
The article adds that virtual agents don't complain when they revisit the same sites and don't have to be paid like real people hiking the mountains. And of course, the virtual Alps can be modified by adding new elements in the landscape such as a cable car or a new hotel.
But are these virtual agents as efficient as real ones? Here is the last paragraph.
To make their model realistic, Duncan Cavens and Christian Gloor, the students who did the actual programming for Dr Nagel, walked through the Alps and talked to hikers they met along the way. They asked people what aspects of their hike they found most pleasurable, where the best viewpoints were and why they had chosen their route. And now that the model is up and running, Mr Cavens and Mr Gloor plan to test the accuracy of their agent-building by inviting real people to come and explore their virtual Alps. The feedback from the electronic hikes these people make will be used to program the agents to behave more realistically and thus point out those places where the cow-bells would ring to greatest effect.
For more information about this project, and to know where I found the above images, you can visit "Planning with Virtual Alpine Landscapes and Autonomous Agents" and more specifically this page.
Sources: The Economist, September 16, 2004; and various other websites
6:36:37 PM
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