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Taxis spend a large amount of time idle, searching for passengers. The routes vacant taxis should follow in order to minimize their idle times are hard to calculate; they depend on complex effects like passenger demand, traffic conditions, and inter-taxi competition. Here we explore if reinforcement learning (RL) can be used for this purpose. Using real-world data from three major cities, we show RL-taxis can indeed learn to minimize their idle times in different environments. In particular, a single RL-taxi competing with a population of regular taxis learns to out-perform its rivals.

Significance Attaching sensors to crowd-sourced vehicles could provide a cheap and accurate way to monitor air pollution, road quality, and other aspects of a city’s health. But in order for so-called drive-by sensing to be practically useful, the sensor-equipped vehicle fleet needs to have large “sensing power”—that is, it needs to cover a large fraction of a city’s area during a given reference period. Here, we provide an analytic description of the sensing power of taxi fleets, which agrees with empirical data from nine major cities. Our results show taxis’ sensing power is unexpectedly large—in Manhattan; just 10 random taxis cover one-third of street segments daily, which certifies that drive-by sensing can be readily implemented in the real world., Sensors can measure air quality, traffic congestion, and other aspects of urban environments. The fine-grained diagnostic information they provide could help urban managers to monitor a city’s health. Recently, a “drive-by” paradigm has been proposed in which sensors are deployed on third-party vehicles, enabling wide coverage at low cost. Research on drive-by sensing has mostly focused on sensor engineering, but a key question remains unexplored: How many vehicles would be required to adequately scan a city? Here, we address this question by analyzing the sensing power of a taxi fleet. Taxis, being numerous in cities, are natural hosts for the sensors. Using a ball-in-bin model in tandem with a simple model of taxi movements, we analytically determine the fraction of a city’s street network sensed by a fleet of taxis during a day. Our results agree with taxi data obtained from nine major cities and reveal that a remarkably small number of taxis can scan a large number of streets. This finding appears to be universal, indicating its applicability to cities beyond those analyzed here. Moreover, because taxis’ motion combines randomness and regularity (passengers’ destinations being random, but the routes to them being deterministic), the spreading properties of taxi fleets are unusual; in stark contrast to random walks, the stationary densities of our taxi model obey Zipf’s law, consistent with empirical taxi data. Our results have direct utility for town councilors, smart-city designers, and other urban decision makers.

We analyse the darkweb and find its structure is unusual. For example, \( \sim \)87\(\%\) of darkweb sites never link to another site. To call the darkweb a “web” is thus a misnomer—it’s better described as a set of largely isolated dark silos. As we show through a detailed comparison to the World Wide Web (www), this siloed structure is highly dissimilar to other social networks and indicates the social behavior of darkweb users is much different to that of www users. We show a generalized preferential attachment model can partially explain the strange topology of the darkweb, but an understanding of the anomalous behavior of its users remains out of reach. Our results are relevant to network scientists, social scientists, and other researchers interested in the social interactions of large numbers of agents.

From fireflies to heart cells, many systems in Nature show the remarkable ability to spontaneously fall into synchrony. By imitating Nature's success at self-synchronizing, scientists have designed cost-effective methods to achieve synchrony in the lab, with applications ranging from wireless sensor networks to radio transmission. A similar story has occurred in the study of swarms, where inspiration from the behavior flocks of birds and schools of fish has led to low-footprint algorithms for multi-robot systems. Here, we continue this `bio-inspired' tradition, by speculating on the technological benefit of fusing swarming with synchronization. The subject of recent theoretical work, minimal models of so-called `swarmalator' systems exhibit rich spatiotemporal patterns, hinting at utility in `bottom-up' robotic swarms. We review the theoretical work on swarmalators, identify possible realizations in Nature, and discuss their potential applications in technology.

We study a new random search process: the taxi drive. The motivation for this process comes from urban sensing in which sensors are mounted on moving vehicles such as taxis, allowing urban environments to be opportunistically monitored. Inspired by the movements of real taxis, the taxi drive is composed of both random and regular parts: passengers are brought to randomly chosen locations via deterministic (i.e. shortest paths) routes. We show through a numerical study that this hybrid motion endows the taxi drive with advantageous spreading properties. In particular, on certain graph topologies it offers reduced cover times compared to random walks and persistent random walks.

Synchronization occurs in many natural and technological systems, from cardiac pacemaker cells to coupled lasers. In the synchronized state, the individual cells or lasers coordinate the timing of their oscillations, but they do not move through space. A complementary form of self-organization occurs among swarming insects, flocking birds, or schooling fish; now the individuals move through space, but without conspicuously altering their internal states. Here we explore systems in which both synchronization and swarming occur together. Specifically, we consider oscillators whose phase dynamics and spatial dynamics are coupled. We call them swarmalators, to highlight their dual character. A case study of a generalized Kuramoto model predicts five collective states as possible long-term modes of organization. These states may be observable in groups of sperm, Japanese tree frogs, colloidal suspensions of magnetic particles, and other biological and physical systems in which self-assembly and synchronization interact., Collective self-organized behavior can be observed in a variety of systems such as colloids and microswimmers. Here O’Keeffe et al. propose a model of oscillators which move in space and tend to synchronize with neighboring oscillators and outline five types of collective self-organized states.