Our elevator doesnt stop for people who called it after it started on the way up. It only picks up people on the way down

I absolutely adore this, I am always trying to guess whichever elevator will come in first in large crowded buildings. Thanks for this article.

I am amazed how in US closing elevator doors switch to opening if someone touches the door edge. This results in abusive behavior of people intentionally jamming their arms in the path of closing doors, and delaying everyone else inside the stopped elevator.

Don't forget the executive elevator algorithm (EEA), which uses a priority interrupt to take passengers directly to the top floor.

This is beautiful. By the end of it I started to feel like I was calculating complicated chess lines in a middle game.

Level 1: Elevators, load balancing (1D arrays)

Level 2: Traffic lights, graphics (2D arrays)

Level 3: Flight control, simulations (3D arrays)

Level 4: Satellite tracking, virtual worlds (4D arrays)

...

So many problems can be cast to arrays to be solved with various linear algebra.

Considering LLMs are "Level 1000+" puzzles in this analogy, I wonder if every problem could be represented by an n-dimensional vector and solvable with algebra.

They at least make great interview questions - Tic-Tac-Toe is commonly given, but is obvious. The board already "looks" like arrays. The less obvious ones, like elevators (or load balancing), are always interesting.

This article gives me war flashbacks about a particularly irritating OO design interview from 5 years ago.

This is cool, but wondering which tool was used to build those animations?

The animation is really cool, how did you make it?

I am wondering where these more complex elevator algorithms are deployed, because I never see them.

I was recently at a Radisson hotel in Germany where I was tried to summon an car, but none would appear for a long time. I believe that someone was keeping the doors open on their floor to wait for someone. The fact that all the other elevators were passing by in both directions was actually a bit infuriating as well.

At that moment I really wished for an algorithm that would recognize when an car spent a significant amount of time on one floor and then reassign the other floors to a new elevator.