(Two geeks are waiting for the elevator on the seventh floor of a seven-story building. The elevator ascends to five and then begins to descend.)<\/p>\n
Geek 1<\/i>: I hate when people do that. Yes, it’s very, very sad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Two geeks are waiting for the elevator on the seventh floor of a seven-story building. The elevator ascends to five and then begins to descend.) Geek 1: I hate when people do that. Geek 2: Yeah. Why should they care where the elevator’s going when they’re getting out anyway? Geek 1: If they have to […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nGeek 2<\/i>: Yeah. Why should they care where the elevator’s going when they’re getting out anyway?
\nGeek 1<\/i>: If they have to press a button, they might choose four at least. That would make sense.
\nGeek 2<\/i>: Not so fast. If we disregard the intra-building trips — which are probably negligible in a residential building — then half of the elevator trips will originate from the first floor and the other half will start at floors two through seven, randomly distributed.
\nGeek 1<\/i>: OK, I see where you’re going with this…
\nGeek 2<\/i>: So, if we take a sample of twelve trips according to the expected distribution, six will originate from the first floor, and one each from floors 2 through 7, which comes to [sums 2 through 7 using Gauss’s trick<\/a>] 27 + 6 is 33, divided by 12, so in fact the optimal floor for the elevator to rest at, to minimize its travel time, is less than 3.
\nGeek 1<\/i>: Immaterial, since floors are integral. But wait a second. Who on the second floor is going to use the elevator anyway?
\nGeek 2<\/i>: Good point. So if we remove the second floor then we’ll add the floors for ten random trips, 5 + 25, divided by 10, looks like the third floor even.
\nGeek 1<\/i>: No way it could be less than the third floor.
\nGeek 2<\/i>: You live on seven. That sounds like special pleading.
\nGeek 1<\/i>: Anyway the whole calculation is off. People tend to leave in the morning and return at night, therefore the optimal floor for the elevator is time-dependent…<\/p>\n