This post reminds me of every time I got in the elevator in the CS department and wondered “how many of the people in this elevator are thinking about the algorithm the elevator is running” lolz.
With lunch, there is of course the balance of walking/waiting time (to which I think the best solution is "buy something in the morning on your way to the convention center") but what always struck me (in general, I wasn't at Mar2023) was that the physicist density for dinner is also very strong near the convention center and drops off much more sharply than r^(-2).
And there are so many other things that numerical calculations could model about conferences, starting with assigning sessions to rooms based on projected demand. Or, arranging of chairs in the conference room to minimize the phenomenon of middle-of-the-aisle chairs free up front, two-deep standees at the back. (My suggestion to that is to create more aisles by removing some chairs, but I don't know the optimal chair/aisle balance.) And while I'm complaining about conference inefficiencies, why hasn't any convention center ever figured out how to efficiently sell coffee?
This post reminds me of every time I got in the elevator in the CS department and wondered “how many of the people in this elevator are thinking about the algorithm the elevator is running” lolz.
With lunch, there is of course the balance of walking/waiting time (to which I think the best solution is "buy something in the morning on your way to the convention center") but what always struck me (in general, I wasn't at Mar2023) was that the physicist density for dinner is also very strong near the convention center and drops off much more sharply than r^(-2).
And there are so many other things that numerical calculations could model about conferences, starting with assigning sessions to rooms based on projected demand. Or, arranging of chairs in the conference room to minimize the phenomenon of middle-of-the-aisle chairs free up front, two-deep standees at the back. (My suggestion to that is to create more aisles by removing some chairs, but I don't know the optimal chair/aisle balance.) And while I'm complaining about conference inefficiencies, why hasn't any convention center ever figured out how to efficiently sell coffee?