The Benefits of Aggressive Driving: First Result

I've included the ability to change lanes. The aggressive car checks how much room it has in front of it in the current lane. If an obstruction is present within a distance, it checks the next lane for obstructions. If none exists in the second lane, it'll change lanes and hopefully improve its situation and elapsed course time.

I ran this program 500 times with the following conditions:

1. the top speed of the aggressive car is 33% faster than the other cars.

2. the acceleration of the aggressive car is twice that of the other cars.

3. the aggressive car will change lanes to improve its situation.

4. the number of cars in the simulation are 22, which makes the density look something like this.

The differences in elapsed time between the aggressive car and a test car starting at the same speed and position are in the histogram below.

According to this simulation, an aggressive driver usually benefits from his strategy but the degree of the benefit varies substantially. By percentage, the aggressive car finishes the course on average 22% faster than the test car.

Next step is to vary the number of obstacle cars and see how that shifts the distribution.