Comment on Someone should really develop this idea
StaticFalconar@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Theres an entire unionized industry of train operators that has a problem with this statement.
Hold up. This gives me an even better idea. What if, and this is totally hypothetical, but instead of self driving cars, we used trains to transport people?
The train could even theoretically transport a whole bunch of people at one time.
Holy shit. I think we are really on to something here.
And you force people to live on train lines. You disenfranchise any community, especially rural poor, by making areas not supported by trains into useless land with added expenses just to live.
There’s no single solution to this. Many modes of transport need to be supported.
Make more railroads and trains, duh. Still doesn’t cover areas where trains simply can’t go, which is where air transport comes in
Cars is the solution.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Up until very recently all train route planning in Sweden was done manually with huge sheets of paper and rulers. Scheduling trains is a very hard problem due to the inability for one train to pass another in many places and the constantly high congestion. Any change in the schedule affects everything.
In computer science it belongs to the class of “NP-hard” problems which are essentially intractable to solve optimally. There are various approximate methods that can be employed to get something that’s almost always good enough.
8oow3291d@feddit.dk 1 month ago
Just because it is a hard problem, it doesn’t mean it is easier to do with paper and rulers than with algorithms. So the problem being “hard” should be unrelated to Sweden being behind the times.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The problem with train scheduling is that computers don’t just make it better. There’s a very real chance computers could make it worse or result in approximately the same outcome but not require millions in investment into a new system.
8oow3291d@feddit.dk 5 weeks ago
The humans are likely following an algorithm of approximation too. If programmed correctly, the computer would be able to try way more approximations using the same algorithm the humans use, and hence likely find a better solution.
It is of course possible to program a computer badly, so you get worse outcomes than the existing human method. But that is kinda besides the point.
kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
I’m having trouble understanding how that relates to the statement about train operators, the ones actually driving the trains because most trains are not autonomous.