IDEAS * USA - The Bus-wait Formula
8th Annual Year in Ideas
New York,NY,USA -TheNew York Times, by CLIVE THOMPSON -December 12, 2008: -- You arrive at the bus stop to catch the ride to work, but the bus isn’t there. Your destination isn’t very far, so you think, Hmm, maybe I should just walk. But then you might find yourself halfway between stops when the bus whips past, which would be deeply annoying. What to do? Should you walk or should you wait?... This question has plagued commuters for years, but this year three undergraduate students at Harvard and Cal Tech decided to resolve it. “We were sick of sitting at a bus stop, not seeing the bus and torturing ourselves over whether we should start walking,” says Scott Kominers, a Harvard student studying math, economics and ethnomusicology. So Kominers and his co-authors, Justin Chen and Robert Sinnott, drew up the problem as a classic game-theory dilemma, began crunching the numbers and, three pages later, had their answer: You should probably wait — and whatever you do, don’t second-guess yourself... Mind you, their equation breaks down in extreme cases. If your journey is relatively short — less than a mile — and you suspect the next bus is half an hour away, they calculate that you should walk. (Though you should walk decisively, without dallying at each stop along the way). But since most trips involve more-punctual buses and longer journeys, waiting is, far more frequently, the winning strategy...
Labels: ideas for riders
posted by Unknown @ 9:43 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home