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A comment on A driver-owned alternative to Uber and Lyft is on the verge of profitability. Parent comment

Re:A driver-owned alternative to Uber and Lyft is on the ver... by lmpdev on Monday July 17, 2023 @10:42PM (#36767173)
Travelling salesman is a largely solved problem, but I'd say this problem is larger.

As soon as humans and the real world are involved, seemingly contradictory criteria need to be met.

Algorithms like A* search may not be able to capture these criteria robustly enough.

Example: a driver may be assigned the optimal route, but because they are human will not want to sit and wait for 15 minutes between several of their rides

A* is great for path finding but it's not a global panacea for all subproblems related to ridesharing

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Re:A driver-owned alternative to Uber and Lyft is on the ver... by tevon on Monday July 17, 2023 @10:46PM (#36767201)
This is true, however these known criteria can be added in, thats the whole point of the heuristic in A*.

Likely one of Uber/Lyfts greatest strengths in their algos is discovering the E[X] of those heuristics. This could probably be captured from the human dispatchers as well.

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