In situations where the cost of common goods or utilities is shared, such as the roommate situation, usually several algorithms are used. Sometimes people take turns bearing the cost of new purchases or renewals. Sometimes people split the cost per head. These are more convenient and efficient than each person acquiring a copy of such goods for oneself. But it isn’t necessarily fair due to usage differentials, although people tend to live with it.

It just occurred to me that a perfectly fair and distributed algorithm is for the person who happens to exhaust a unit quantity of a common good to replace it with a new unit, at own cost. This shares cost proportional to actual use (probabilistically), but doesn’t require any coordination or accounting.

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I wonder why elevator buttons aren’t toggle buttons… Many a time the wrong button is pressed and the elevator must then take the extra time to stop, when cancelling the mistake would have been quick and efficient.

This has got me thinking about elevator algorithms (i.e. real elevator algorithms, not the elevator algorithm).

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