As we are entering the season of the Hollywood Fringe Festival (FB) again, meaning over 350 shows and events spread over Hollywood and West Hollywood during the month of June, it is worth reconsidering the problem of how to best schedule the shows you want to see in the time you have within your budget. My current solution has been to build a spreadsheet of shows that I’m interested in with all their times and durations, sort by start day and time, and try to do a best fit by visual methods. Here’s last year’s schedule as an example.
But this is an imprecise method, and truthfully, a royal pain to set up. Two years ago I presented a programming challenge to address the problem. No solutions came out of it. So I’m trying again. Now I’m not an actor, director, producer, or anything connected with the theatre industry, other than an audience member. I am, however, a computer scientist. I’m a software engineer, and I know how to draw up specifications for problems to be solved. Scheduling the Fringe is a solvable problem, although perhaps not NP complete and a bit travelling salesmanish.
Here’s my challenge to you: I’m going to lay out the problem as I see it. Can you develop an app or a web page that can solve the problem in a usable fashion? No pay involved other than the glory of the challenge, but I will pass any good results on to the folks at the Fringe.
Here’s the problem:
- You have a database of shows and events. Each show has webpage link, a title, a venue, a ticket price, a running time, and some set of performance times.
- You have a database of venues, each with a street address (which you can likely use a Google interface to get GPS coordinates and walk time).
- You have a list of shows and events that someone is interested in, together with what we’ll call an interest level: 0 – no interest to 3 – must see. This could be an added parameter on the current Favorites list (go to the website, create a user, and then you can save favorites), or it might be entered in some other way.
- You have a list of times for which the person is available, including some times marked a “meal breaks”. For example, I might be available weekends between 11am and 11pm, with a 1 hour dinner break after 5pm. You get to determine the most user friendly way to specify this. Perhaps this could interface with Google Calendar?
- You have a desired dollar amount they want to spend on tickets.
Given these inputs, produce a best fit schedule, that includes as many of the highest priority shows as possible, then as many of the next priority tier down, and so on for priorities 1-3. You need to take into account walking time between venues, or if the distance between venues exceeds the walking time by 15 minutes, driving and parking time (parking can take up to 15 minutes if you aren’t lucky). You could build into the schedule transportation between non-walkable venues via Lyft or Uber. You need to take into account meal breaks. Allocate 10 minutes before a show to allow time to check in and get seated. Make sure the total cost does not exceed what the user has indicated.
Ideally, this tool might even connect to the ticketing system (including purchasing Fringe buttons) such that once a schedule is set, it can be ticketed. There might be the need to adjust if a show is sold out of tickets. Ideally, whatever it ticketed could then be saved to Google Calendar or whatever the Mac folks use.
For now, build the databases as you see fit. If you need, I can talk to the Fringe folks and get you information on the JSON/XML API to interface with their site. Ideally, this should be something usable by folks used to normal websites (i.e., not a complicated interface). Who knows, you might be able to design it as an app.
I think this is a solvable problem, and might actually be a good assignment for a class as an example of a real world problem. Feel free to post questions here, and either I’ll answer them based on my experience, or I’ll pass them to the Fringe for resolution.
OK, Go….
