Rush Hour 8

[Renau Sheard]

Energy Rush Hours are like traffic rush hours. Just as traffic clogs up roads when everyone drives to work at the same time, Energy Rush Hours occur when everyone in a particular area turns on air conditioning (AC) or heating at once. Imagine what can happen when millions of people turn on their air conditioners during a heat wave. This, in addition to all the usual energy use in households (running the refrigerator, the TV, lights, computers etc.) creates a peak in energy demand and increases costs.

Recently my thermometer has displayed a yellow gear/leaf icon indicating it's in Rush Hour, and my house gets up 80 degrees before I notice how hot it is. Where I live, temps are usually 90+ degrees (with feel-likes over 100) in the summer.

I never heard of "Rush Hour" before until i Googled it. I rent, and my utilities are billed through the property mgmt company - I don't have any acct # or anything w/the actual energy supplier (Duke Energy). Property mgmt must have signed up for Rush Hour, because I did not.

Plenty of ppl in this country don't have utilities in their name (by choice or otherwise) - but do have Nest thermostats personally belonging to us (as mine is) and do pay the utilities (as I do) and live at affected properties.

Property Management didn't ask me if I wanted to opt in. They didn't even give me any notice this program existed, or that they had taken it upon themselves to enroll my address. They are a rental property company that has thousands of homes across the country; getting rebates for interfering with their tenants' energy usage is just another income stream for them.

I can ask them as nicely as possible, but they aren't under any requirement to do so. This one way opt-in/opt-out is shortsighted and excludes potentially millions of renters from taking advantage of and/or getting the property we pay to live at out of a program that directly affects us.

Thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry to hear that you're having an issue with the Rush Hour feature of your Nest Thermostat. Just to clarify, do you want to un-enroll from Rush Hour or just opt out of the event? To opt out of a Rush Hour event, you could adjust your thermostat or the Google Home or Nest app to a lower temperature (summer events) or a higher temperature (winter events). A confirmation message will appear if you want to opt out of the event. Then select Change Temp on the thermostat or the Google Home or Nest app.

I wanted to check in and see if you managed to see Edward's post. Please let me know if you have any questions from here. I would be happy to assist, and make sure you are good to go.

Best regards,
Jake

A. Schedule my AC colder than I want (and use more electricity) around 4pm so that when rush hour starts (and it's pre-cooling drops the temp even more), the Rush hour idle temperature will be at the temperature I'm comfortable with. No.

Sorry to hear you are still having trouble with the Rush Hour program. In some cases, you may need to contact your energy provider to opt out of the program. Have you tried contacting them yet? I did find an article with more details on the program that may be of help. Please let me know if your energy provider is able to help you opt out of that.

Hey folks,

We appreciate your help here, @dexter11.
@lenj, I wanted to follow up and see if you are still in need of any help. This is not the experience we want you to have and we'll take this as feedback. Please let me know if you are still having any concerns or questions from here, as I would be happy to take a closer look and assist you further.

Thanks,
Mel

I gave up. The last specialist I talked to says the unemployment was pending. I asked what was it waiting for and when would it be complete. He replied he didn't know. I asked to be connected with someone who did she the reply was "no one here knows".

Here I am a week later, and the thermostat is still being controlled by Nest. I called again today, another hour on the phone and the rep told me I am unenrolled but it is pending. I asked why is it pending and the agent said I don't know.

This is the worst support organization on earth. I could never recommend Nest or any Google product. After this episode in non-support, they have lost a phone purchase and further Google Home expansion.

The trite phrase "this is not the experience we want you to have" is about as sincere as the trite phrase "sorry for the inconvenience. If Google wanted a better customer experience, why are the overwhelming majority of feedback posts negative about the support? Needless to say, Google lost any further business of mine in the phone, Nest or Home arenas.

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Rush Hour
if you're not familiar with it, the game consists of a collection of cars of varying sizes, set either horizontally or vertically, on a NxM grid that has a single exit.
Each car can move forward/backward in the directions it's set in, as long as another car is not blocking it. You can never change the direction of a car.
There is one special car, usually it's the red one. It's set in the same row that the exit is in, and the objective of the game is to find a series of moves (a move - moving a car N steps back or forward) that will allow the red car to drive out of the maze.

For classic Rush Hour, this problem is very tractable with a simple breadth first search. The claimed hardest known initial configuration requires 93 moves to solve, with a total of only 24132 reachable configurations. Even a naively implemented breadth-first search algorithm can explore the entire search space in under 1 second on even a modest machine.

The algorithm is essentially a breadth first search, implemented with a queue as is typical. A predecessor map is maintained so that any state can be traced back to the initial state. A key will never be remapped, and as entries are inserted in breadth-first search order, shortest path is guaranteed.

There is plenty of redundant work here (e.g. long "alleys" are scanned multiple times), but as mentioned before, although the generalized version is PSPACE-complete, the classic Rush Hour variant is very tractable by brute force.

It use a breadth first search (BFS). The trick is to look for a board layout that you have see before in earlier searches and abort that sequence. Due to the BFS if you have seen that layout before you have already got there a shorter way so let that squence keep trying to solve it rather than this longer one.

As you noted, the search space will be large - but not too large, if you have a reasonable sized board. For example, you've drawn a 6x6 grid with 12 cars on it. Assuming each is a size-2 car, that gives 5 spaces/per, so at most 5^12 = 244,140,625 potential positions. This even fits in a 32-bit integer. So one possibility is to allocate a huge array, one slot per potential position, and use memoization to make sure that you don't repeat a position.

The next thing to note is that most of those "potential" positions aren't, in fact, possible (they'd involve cars overlapping). So instead, use a hash table to keep track of each position you've visited. This will have a small memory overhead per entry, but it'll probably be more space-efficient than the "huge array" solution. It will, however, take a bit longer for each entry access.

That said, either of the two above solutions to the repeated-position problem should work for smallish grids. It'll all be determined by how big the problem is, and how much memory your computer has; but the example you displayed should be no trouble at all, even for a ordinary desktop computer.

Just finished writing my implementation and experimenting with it. I agree with polygenelubricants that the state space is really small for the classic game (6x6 board). However, I tried a clever search implementation (A* search). I was curious regarding the reduction of explored state space in comparison to a simple BFS.

A* algorithm can be viewed as a generalization of BFS search. The decision of which path to explore next is determined by a score that combines both the path length (i.e. number of moves) and a lower bound on the remaining moves count.The way I chose to compute the latter, is to get the distance of the red car from the exit, and then add 1 for every vehicle in the way, since it has to be moved at least once in order to clear the way. When I replace the lower bound calculation with a constant 0, I get a regular BFS behavior.

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