Show HN: Public transportation signage based on bloom filters (rough mockup)

Hello, I was running around Germany, hectically navigating public transportation, and getting lost all the time. I noticed that every station had i platforms, each used lists of n buses (trains, whatever) arriving, each has their list of m destinations. That means I would be scanning i x n x m items just to see if I was at the correct stop. As I was nervous, for every bus that arrived, I would rescan the list of stops to double check. I began thinking how I could make a better system.

Linked is a very shoddy mockup of how bloom filters could be used to allow passengers O(1) lookup time for which platform+bus is the correct one. I believe it's likely for public transportation to grow increasingly more complex in the future, as population grows, and under the current list-based system, this will make the signage ever more complex. I think some bloom filter mechanism could reduce that complexity.

So, here is my fantasy, my day dream. What do you think?

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35248912

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