Green Pete
Active Member
Ah... so the unsubstantiated, hand waving claim about parking lots being more difficult. Yeah, sounds like an academic rather than an engineer. Academics are important and can have significant insights, but the problem space is somewhat orthogonal. Navigating a parking lot is not the same as driving on roads -- there are entirely different constraints. And saying it is inversely proportional to speed is silly in a "makes sense if you only consider it superficially" sorta way. There's nothing inherent about driving 80mph that makes the problem "less complex", but because of the realities of response time, braking distance, etc., for safety roads are engineered to have less complexity when they are designed for high speed.
But lets say he is correct about the relationship where complexity is inversely proportional, it only accounts for the overlap and says absolutely nothing about the difficulty in improvement. Nor does complexity necessarily tell you anything about the difficulty. That's like saying the average is comparable to the standard deviation.
In the end, just silly hand waving.
[edited to add: just as a point about difficulty vs complexity: making a turn is certainly not difficult, its a matter of controlling the steering wheel angle. Greater speed increases the uncertainty of future states with the same time delta -- that makes it more difficult to achieve high accuracy predictions. Which, in turn, are necessary to determine what the steering wheel angle should be. While momentum helps with improving trajectory plots there are limits (e.g., braking, acceleration, too sharp of a turn causing instability, etc.) that doesn't help with pothole detection and avoidance, curve maintenance, etc.]
The inverse speed to complexity relationship is probably something like this: the reason you are going so slow is that the number and variation of things that could happen is so high. If you could be 100% certain you weren't gonna have shopping carts pop out of nowhere or kids running around in a parking lot you could drive around at 30mph (or 70mph really). But you can't safely make that assumption. The speed is not the cause of the complexity, it is the symptom of the complex driving task.