2 Responses to Elevator Instructions – waffles121

1. davidbdale says:

   October 11, 2024 at 3:39 pm

   There’s a lot of good work here, Waffles.

   By now you either saw in class or perhaps have learned from the Daily Agenda of the extraordinary work submitted by Crabs on this assignment. I will grade this draft of yours and let you decide whether to make improvements.

   A few observations about your own instructions:

   • Elevators don’t have to be told to wait. They are told to close their doors, proceed to a floor, open their doors, skip a floor. When they’ve completed a task, they are effectively dead. They’re not waiting. They’re just stationary.
   • If you want an elevator to “wait on the first floor until it’s called into action,” you can do that:
     • After one minute of inactivity, proceed to the first floor. [That’s it.]
   • If you want first-floor elevators to always have open doors when they’re not in use, to indicate that they’re available, you can do that:
     • After one minute of inactivity, proceed to the first floor and open doors. [That’s all you need to say.]
   • What you DON’T have to do is tell the elevator to go to 1, open doors, and wait for a commuter to press a button to call it to action again. Your “call to action” commands will take care of that for you.

   YOUR INSTRUCTIONS:

   • Remain idle at Floor 1 until an Indication Button is pressed by a commuter.
     • —Remain idle is the same as “wait.” This instruction is completely unnecessary.

   • The Indication Button will either be the Up Button or the Down Button.
     • —This category you’ve created, the “Indication Button” will be understood by the elevator just as well as Up Button is understood. The instruction is useful to THE HUMAN READERS LIKE ME who can follow the instructions better with that knowledge, but it’s irrelevant to the elevator. I’ve been calling them CALL BUTTONS or SUMMONS BUTTONS, which makes their purpose a little more clear than INDICATION BUTTON.

   • When the Indication Button is pressed either open the doors if the button was pressed at Floor 1, or move to the floor that the button was pressed on if the indication came from a higher floor.
     • —You don’t need different instructions for the first floor.
     • —Whatever floor the elevator is on when a CALL BUTTON is pressed, it will open the doors when it’s at that floor or close the doors before it proceeds to that floor.

   THE DOOR SECTION

   • Once the elevator doors are open, leave them open for a minimum of 20 seconds.
     • —Setting a time limit for the doors to be open is a good idea, but 20 seconds is an eternity for elevator doors. (Time them the next time you’re waiting for one to close.)
   • If there are blockages that are preventing the doors from closing then remain open until the blockages have cleared.
     • —This is nicely done, but you’ll have to tell the elevator to re-open the doors. They can’t remain open until they’re open. They don’t stop halfway.

   THE TRAVEL SECTION

   • After the commuter has entered the elevator and pressed a Floor Button to signal the floor they would like to arrive at, commence motion.
   • Move to the floor number that corresponds to the Floor Button that was pressed uninterrupted unless an Indication Button is pressed by another commuter during the trip.
   • If another commuter presses a button for a floor that the elevator has yet to pass, then stop on the floor that the signal came from and repeat the process of opening and closing the doors mentioned previously in Step Two.
     • This section is problematic. It doesn’t establish a set of rules that takes into account which direction the elevator is traveling when Floor Buttons or Call buttons are pressed.
     • You want the elevator to ignore DOWN buttons while it’s traveling UP and vice versa, until it reaches the highest or lowest floor it’s been called to or sent to.
       • You can state that as one rule or two.
     • Conversely, you want it to respond to UP buttons from floors it hasn’t reached yet if it’s traveling UP. Similarly for DOWN buttons.

   GIVE WAFFLES A BREAK, DH.

   Anyway, Waffles, as a general rule, you can ignore passengers (commuters) completely from your instructions. The elevator doesn’t know what they are. It responds to button presses and rules, period.

   I’ll hold off on grading this until you put it into Grade Please. Otherwise, you can put it back into Feedback Please at any time following improvements.

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2. davidbdale says:

   October 14, 2024 at 3:49 am

   Too late. Grading everybody this morning. Put this back into Grade Please following any significant improvements.

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