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Comment by elliott34 | Hacker News Reader

The ideas of PID theory are really useful in a lot of operational/automation contexts.

For example, if your business is using any sort of machine learning model to govern a process, and you have some sort of idea of how you want this process to run throughout the day, you can build a PID system to change the model thresholds automatically to govern that plan.

An example might be any sort of retention/marketing strategy where you want to reach out to customers based on some factors X, and have a certain quota/capacity to do so during a day, and the expected number of customers with the best factors X can change throughout the day/week or is just erratic.

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I have a master on automation & contorl, and never thought of using it outside the industry

Last Fall my roommate was taking a class on computer networks, he ended up inventing PID as a flow-control algorithm, though he didn't know to call it PID.

Oddly enough I too unknowingly implemented a PID controller without prior exposure to the theory. I was trying to make a stable hovering platform using only thrusters in Garry's Mod. I remember once I tweaked the parameters just right it was amazingly responsive and stable. I only realized what I had actually done years later.

You're using it every time you buy airline tickets. The vast majority of Dynamic Pricing algorithms are just PID algorithms that are designed to maintain sales rates such that the last ticket is sold at flight time.

The PID loop may even have potential in the development of wealth-backed currencies: https://github.com/pjkundert/ownercredit.

Imagine a currency that supports the creation of 'K' units of currency upon the presentation of any form of wealth with a market-determined price, and then uses a PID loop to automatically adjusts 'K' to guarantee no inflation or deflation.

Perhaps a path toward the removal of "Usury" as the foundation of the monetary system?

Experimenting with these concepts required a robust Python PID loop implementation, which was (surprisingly) difficult to find. A useful Python PID implementation is available in ownercredit.pid (get it with: pip install ownercredit).

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