"Perfect" Google map algorithm under emergency conditions
I took a vacation to Cuba lately, and on the way there we'd been told the Irma is coming our way so we should head back ahead of schedule.
When we were still on the cruise, I immediately made a decision to book a rental car in Tampa. When we got there, we took the car heading straight back to Raleigh without going to the airport. This approved to be one of my best decision later, and I do not have many best decisions made in my lifetime.
We got six people in an SUV. Being part of the largest US migration from Florida is no fun, not to mention you have the risk of running out of gas along the way since most of the gas station had no gas until we hit South Carolina. We actually admired one of the cars in front of us with three gas tanks on its roof.
As a software engineer, I'm always amazed by Google product. I use google map all the time, just got so used to it. It can tell you the best route, and it can suggest you another route if the current route got accident etc. Apparently, you don't have to be a software engineer to be a fan of Google product. When you have an accident every 10-30 minutes, I guess a lot of people is under stress getting out of their home. Even the weather wasn't as bad as people expected, it didn't help people's bad mood at that time.
When you got an accident ahead of you, Google suggested you another possible route which could save 10mins, and in our case 1 hour, at least what Google says. That was huge opportunity considering the entire trip only should take us 10 hours to go home. When we got to this suggested place, it was middle of no-where, which is cool. But there was a lot of other cars coming ahead of us, so the traffic was still bad. And since the place is a low traffic place, the road condition wasn't expected to have this much of car coming. Then you know what happened, we choked again, only this time at this artificial location.
Of course, Google algorithm is not only precise but also can continue forever attributing to its recursive nature. So when it detected we were under choking position, it suggested you with another best route, which of course would save us 45mins. Well, time doesn't matter anymore, all we wanted was to get out of this artificial (or soon to be real) traffic. Then once again, every one of us was going there again.
There were more and more cases later on this trip I'd been convinced it's this precise Google algorithm causing artificial problems when trying to solve a real problem, only this time, the problem is on a bigger scale than what it has anticipated. I still think Google's algorithm is perfectly crafted and executed. No doubt about that, since it has been consistently doing the same perfect thing from the beginning to the end.
My only cent here is that this might not necessarily work for the emergency case when you only provide one best solution for million people. It reminds me government suggests us do one thing at the same time, in history, it never is a good thing. Because that one thing is too perfect to have any noise in it, therefore it doesn't have any variation out of the master plan. Even the masterplan is 100% legit good, you have to consider the number of cases that will be applied to this master plan, or should I say the rate of cases applied to it per second. The rate of the number of cases does matter, especially under emergency or national activity. Maybe we should consider switching to another "better" mood to accommodate or introduce some noise to the system. One thing certain is that there's no such thing as "perfect", and the perception itself is delusional, and only reveals its stupidity under certain conditions, for certain.
It's a shame when it happens. Because watching problem created by us right front of us is a pain. I don't know about you, I can't watch when trillion dollars is printed and used, only in the end to sink the boat.