Self-Driving Cars Coping With Traffic Havoc And Creating Traffic Havoc

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/ and http://ai-selfdriving-cars.libsyn.com/website]

Let’s talk about havoc. In sports, one of the more unusual and lesser-known metrics for analyzing football teams consists of their havoc rating.

To calculate a havoc rating, you count up the number of football plays that your defense was able to disrupt against the opposing team, such as plays when your defense was able to intercept the football or forced the opposing team to fumble the ball, or tackled the opposing side for a loss of yardage, and so on. Next, you divide that count of disrupted plays by the total number of plays undertaken by the opposing team.

The resulting fraction is turned into a percentage, allowing you to readily see what percentage of the time that the defense was able to mess-up the opposing side’s offense. For example, if there were 100 plays by the opposing team and your defense was able to undermine the offense on 25 of those plays, you would have a havoc rating of 25% (that’s 25 divided by 100).

The offense wants to keep the havoc rating as low as possible; the defense is aiming to get as high a havoc rating as they can, showcasing how often they can cause the offense to slip-up. If you had a havoc rating of 100%, it would mean that on every play that was run by the opposing team, you managed to confound their efforts. That would be tremendous as a defense. Of course, if you had a havoc rating of zero, it would suggest that your defense is not doing its job and that the opposing side is making plays without being at all disturbed or undermined.

Havoc ratings can be used in other endeavors too. Perhaps we ought to be using a havoc rating when it comes to the emergence of true AI-based autonomous self-driving cars.

Understanding Havoc And Self-Driving Cars

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