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Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

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Re: Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

#41

Post by em-bee »

adenozine wrote: post #24
alasdair_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this question during a Google interview. The interviewer became annoyed when I suggested that an elevator that sometimes went backwards to pick ip someone on a just-missed floor could at least be interesting, if not perfectly efficient. They had a preconceived idea that they wanted a stateless system and didn’t like my stateful approach, even if it was potentially better for end users.

Yeah, that's one reason I stopped doing like code-this-thing style of interviews. There's no point in contriving problems for someone, we could both be working on something useful. I think for me at least, the main attribute I look for in a candidate for a developer role is the ability-to-avoid-shitty-solutions-ness of someone. If they steer themselves from bad ideas well, the rest can be taught by presentation and p…

the problem is having particular expectations at the outcome, which is wrong. even after hiring, if i have a particular expectation how problems are to be solved, then that will lead to disappointment, micromanagement and disempowerment of my developers. i did use elevatorsaga in interviews with good results. having someone making such an unusual suggestion in an interview would be a plus for me. this person is thinking out of the box. and it would lead to a discussion of the difference of optimizing solutions for overall performance vs user expectations.

Re: Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

#42

Post by em-bee »

ziptron wrote: post #29

I always wished elevator buttons could toggle. If you accidentally press the wrong floor, just press it again to cancel. This may not work in all situations, but in some situations, it could be a time saver.

our elevator does that, and i noticed it is quite common in chinese elevators. i can undo all destinations which makes the elevator just stop.

living on the top floor of a highrise, i was occasionally able to use that when i realized that i forgot something at home (although most times it takes me longer to realize that than the elevator needs to make it all the way down)

it is also very useful when the kids are naughty and press all the buttons for fun

Re: Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

#43

Post by em-bee »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #34
curmudgeon22 wrote: post #27

During Covid, I've often wished I could reprogram the elevator of the apartment building I live in. The current rule is only 2 people can be in the elevator at a time. Problems that arise: * Elevator stopping frequently, but already at capacity, slowing down overall performance * Elevator always goes to bottom (or top) first to pick up passengers going up (or down). This means if your waiting on the ground floor and…

Elevator could also make a decent guess at fullness just by recording the discrete changes in weight. It wouldn't be perfect but again it would probably be better than allowing user input.

i believe all elevators at least have a failsafe to refuse to run if they are overloaded. going from there to tracking and using the actual weight for its programming is not a big step

Re: Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

#44

Post by alasdair_ »

adenozine wrote: post #24
alasdair_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this question during a Google interview. The interviewer became annoyed when I suggested that an elevator that sometimes went backwards to pick ip someone on a just-missed floor could at least be interesting, if not perfectly efficient. They had a preconceived idea that they wanted a stateless system and didn’t like my stateful approach, even if it was potentially better for end users.

Yeah, that's one reason I stopped doing like code-this-thing style of interviews. There's no point in contriving problems for someone, we could both be working on something useful. I think for me at least, the main attribute I look for in a candidate for a developer role is the ability-to-avoid-shitty-solutions-ness of someone. If they steer themselves from bad ideas well, the rest can be taught by presentation and p…

I didn’t. I tried again later in my career but ended up taking up Facebook’s offer before the final Google round.

Re: Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

#45

Post by em-bee »

spicybright wrote: post #33
lucb1e wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's amazing. I'll be trying that trick next time I have some time to kill in a building! We also play the game sometimes of getting places we're not supposed to (as consultants). Walk around like you're from IT and are supposed to be there (technically both true), perhaps with a laptop under your arm, nobody will care what you do to any of the computers there. In schools and hospitals, and probably other places, t…

I'm sure for surgery rooms (at least), needing someone to rush in to help and having them fumble with ID cards outweighs a bad party trying to, I guess, muck up a surgery or something.

in the hospitals that i have been for visits usually the whole intensive care area and other sensitive areas were access controlled. so while the door to the actual surgery room might have been open, you are often not even allowed anywhere near.

Re: Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

#46

Post by em-bee »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #26
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can be. Express elevators and such. But mainly the programs are limited to what floor the elevators idle at because more complicated programs even if more efficient overall often piss people off.

>which floors the elevators idle at... I recently spent 4 months in hospital which left me with an amount of time to kill in an attempt to stay sane. One of the games was trying to get places I was technically allowed but really shouldn't have been ("sod your 'no public access' signs, in not public, I'm an inpatient!"). Being confined to a wheelchair made the game a bit more difficult. One day one of the ward staff m…

our elevator allows undoing pressed buttons. if no buttons are pressed, then the elevator will stop. now you could play a game where you try to get the elevator to stop at a particular floor without pressing that floors button. the only downside is that our elevator does not open the doors if no button is pressed, so any off-limit floors would remain inaccessible

Re: Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)

#47

Post by changoplatanero »

Jun8 wrote: post #15

Made me remember an interesting anecdote: During my PhD at Purdue I had the good luck to take the Pattern Recognition (nowadays would be called ML) course from Prof. Fukunaga, one of the pioneers in the field ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keinosuke_Fukunaga ). In one of his classes he mentioned that years ago a company came to him, requesting his expertise in optimizing movement of a bank of elevators. He thought…

In my ML class some students did a project on using reinforcement learning to optimize elevators. They told me that after 100 years of operation the algorithm would have enough data to start working really well.
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