Wednesday, September 9

A geeky way to waste the day

Title in verse too!

Being relatively brain washed after a mediocre submission on Monday, I slacked the whole day yesterday and prepared our schedule for the New Zealand trip (more coming soon). Today I decided to be (a bit) more constructive so I wrote a crappy abstract that my supervisor trashed in 2 seconds flat and! spent about three hours coding a simulation to see how my 1 HOUR AND TWENTY MINUTES waiting time to register for RUN NUS could have been improved. Possible candidates were:

  • A single queue with two laptops

  • Each laptop with its individual queue

  • Manual - since what the people servicing the laptops were doing was to write your number down (signifying that you are there) and then quickly assign you a wave number - no algorithm for that, they could have just walked among us with a clipboard and do that



The first approach got an average waiting time of 6.21 min with a maximum waiting time of 97.38 minutes.

The second approach got an average waiting time of 7 minutes and a maximum waiting time of 109.09 mins (provided people queued at the shortest queue - which i didn't).

Conclusions: a) the manual approach would have been better.

b) After wasting another day on this, I know I will not run RUN NUS next year.

c) There are better ways to slack than this pseudo-science. Pfft.

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