4 ms·
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
by Jun8 5y ago
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 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 it would be trivial :-) After telling us that all his approaches failed miserably, he had one of his impish laughs and told us that he never worked on that problem again. Miss that guy. Get a copy of his book (https://books.google.com/books/about/Introduction_to_Statistical_Pattern_Reco.html?id=BIJZTGjTxBgC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1 https://books.google.com/books/about/Introduction_to_Statist...) if you can, it’s written in the “old style” but very informative.
Interesting fact: Gen Fukunaga (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gen_Fukunaga https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gen_Fukunaga), founder of anime company Funimation, is his son.
- labster 5y agoI’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.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoI think it would fundamentally be a constraint based programming problem, eg the sudoku solvers, travelling salesman implementations, software that tells eg Amazon warehouses which parcels go in the van first based on both size and the route it’s planned so that the driver never had to dig all the parcels out to get the buried ones.
- MobileVet 5y agoBoiler Up! I had Prof Fukunaga for EE301 I think (Might have been EE202). I was too young and dumb to recognize his brilliance.
- changoplatanero 5y agoIn 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.
- abhgh 5y agoThere 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 watching themselves and others while waiting.
- b0afc375b5 5y agoI first heard of this from Dr. Russell Ackoff's Systems Thinking Speech. I had a mini mind blown moment.
- jyriand 5y agoReminds me a parable from Are your lights on by Gerald Weinberg.
- clarkmoody 5y agoI pounded my head on this problem in a multi-agent system course in graduate school. Needless to say, I could not outperform a simple naive algorithm however hard I tried.