Consulting

 

Fugue for Tinhorns

I got the horse right here,
The name is Paul Revere,
And here's a guy that says if the weather's clear,
Can do,
Can do,
This guy says the horse can do

That guy is me.

The lyrics above are from Guys and Dolls and were sung by the racetrack touts, including Nicely-Nicely. For all of my public and private career, I realize that I am no different than a tout. A tout tries to make a prediction about the outcome of a random event. Ethical touts will use whatever information and methods are available to give their customers an edge in knowing the outcome before the event. Unethical touts will tell their customers what they themselves don’t believe and those touts may tell conflicting stories to different customers of the same event, in hopes of one of them being the winning side.

I have been a traffic modeler for most of my life. Like a racetrack tout, I have been trying to beat the odds and make predictions. But I hope that I never lose sight of the fact that they are only predictions. When I forecast a trip table, forecast mode share, or forecast volumes on a link, I am not guaranteeing an outcome. All of the methods in these predictions are based on identifying the most probable outcome among many, not the only outcome that will happen.

There are contests in which there are only a limited number of outcomes, for example Tic‑Tac‑Toe. By analyzing all these outcomes, it is possible to see what future outcomes can result from each current outcome. If you play first in Tic-Tac-Toe, then you may have a winning strategy on each play.  However, the player playing second can always make a play in response that forces a draw. Thus it is possible to develop a book on each play that will lead to at least a draw. Unless the opposing player makes a mistake and does not make their best move, it is impossible to win at Tic Tac Toe.  It is possible to memorize that “book” of best plays. Because the number of plays is limited, it is even possible to train a chicken to play Tic-Tac-Toe. (If a chicken makes a mistake, then it is eaten and won’t play again. Fortunately for them, politicians don’t taste very good).  The book in Checkers is larger but it does exist. The book in Chess is even larger and is incomplete at present. A Rubik’s Cube has 43,003,274,489,856,000 positions, only one of which is the winning position. And yet there are people who have memorized the best way to get from any position to the winning position, such that there are contests of how fast you can ‘solve” a Rubik’s Cube (the current record is 3.47 seconds).

The challenge of traffic modeling is that there is not yet a complete book on how to get to a winning solution. Until then, like Nicely-Nicely, I will keep touting customers on ways to beat the odds.