Algorithms Reading Group Scribes for September 03, 2010: The Parking Problem

The first session of this semester’s Algorithms Reading Group dealt with the problem of parking cars on the streets of New York City. The goal is to analyze different parking behaviors and observe to what extent following some parking strategy can affect the maximum number of cars that can be parked on the street. Such analysis can be useful for finding out what parking patterns provide the maximum utilization of the street space. In addition, this problem has the secret motivation. Figure 1 represents a sketch of the invention by Prof. Skiena. We speculate that it has to do with the initiative to improve the parking habits of New Yorkers, but the details of the idea have not been fully revealed yet; we do know, however, that the analysis of various parking behaviors is of great importance for this project.