81–90 of 103 posts
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.
One past discussion, plus a one-commenter: Elevator Saga: The Elevator Programming Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425054 - Nov 2019 (1 comment) Elevator Saga – An elevator programming game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8929314 - Jan 2015 (104 comments)
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…
There is this anecdote in the text "Operations Research, An Introduction." by Hamdy Taha, which I consider to be a very good example of picking the right tools for the job. An OR group was hired to fix elevator wait times in an office building. After studying the problem they installed full-length mirrors at the entrance to the elevators. Complaints around elevator service disappeared as people were now engaged in wa…
An interesting improvement over naive operation I thought long ago: idle elevators should go to 1/2 maximum floor! You easily cut average wait times in 1/2! Problem is, it's also energy inefficient. If you get a passenger at floor 1 or 0, you've wasted a lot of movement. On-demand movement wastes minimally. So I've learned of a tradeoff between energy and waiting time -- not just elevator speed, but in algorithms. It…
1) distribution of arrival times and destinations of passengers;
(For example, if late evening people usually go up, it's best to idle on ground floor)
2) a "satisfaction function", giving a measure of performance of your system:
You can get low average waiting times and diverging maximum wait time for a busy elevator, simply trade time from a single passenger for others (by e.g. never going to a floor). As long as utilization is significant at all times, this phenomenon exists.
Clearly it's not only average we care about, but also maximum and minima of transit times.
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It's a very illuminating modelling exercise.
What am I doing wrong? for(elevator of elevators) { elevator.on('idle', () => { //do some logic with elevator }) } It only seems to run for the second elevator rather than both of them?
Should be `for (let elevator of elevators)`
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…
I’ve always wondered if the main computer in Star Trek has to be so big just to manage the turbolifts. Three dimensional elevators with multiple exits per level, probably prioritizing routes dynamically based on the passengers and the military alert level. Imagine the algorithms.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to have those elevators where I worked and everybody hated them. I think the algorithm was tuned for efficiency, so you’d be waiting for an elevator for minutes as it tries to batch everyone up, while a dozen other elevators sit idle. This was made worse through the need to specify the number of people who are travelling to a specific floor so the algorithm can allocate enough space in each elevator. Large gro…
This is the problem - if the system goes beyond “what floor should I idle at” and “do I idle door open” people get mad at it because of apparent unfairness and inefficiency even if it is actually more efficient overall. Same thing happens with traffic lights.
I don't remember the article but I remember reading about a building management game where the reviewer believed the entire game was based around the elevator management code and that writing that code was fun for the programmer but the game itself was not fun for the player. It looks like this highlights the "fun for the programmer" part.
Maybe Sim Tower? The game was pretty boring, but building and managing elevators to keep people happy was a fun challenge.
https://www.gamesradar.com/simrefinery-the-lost-oil-plant-ga...
Call me weird, but I’ve been fascinated by elevator logic since I was a child. I had a math curiosities book that dedicated a chapter to it and after reading that I was hooked on knowing more. I wish my knowledge of JavaScript was more than “programming language that’s not Java” so I could actually play this. Could anyone recommend an online introduction to JS so I can attempt to play this? I’m more of a bash guy.