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| Selfie by our tour guide with another cast member |
The Mouse
This morning we got to go “backstage” in Magic Kingdom on the Keys to the Kingdom tour given to us by our hilarious tour guide Megan. This signature Disney tour goes behind the magic of Disney World, explaining some of the little known history and secrets of the happiest place on earth. And lucky you, we’re going to share some of these “secrets” with you. One of the coolest parts of the tour was getting to explore part of the Utilidor; that’s right, the Magic Kingdom really does have secret underground tunnels! The Utilidor is the real ground level to the Magic Kingdom that is used by staff and cast members to help maintain the four keys to the Kingdom- safety, courtesy, show, and efficiency. Cast members and characters can use the Utilidor to travel across the park without being seen out of costume or in the wrong “land.” Maintenance use the corridors to quickly transport any require tools or equipment, and Reedy Creek Emergency Services (Disney has to provide their own emergency services due to its size and spread across two counties) can use the tunnels to quickly access guests in need without dealing with crowds above. Part of the Utilidor is also used to vacuum trash collected above into a tunnel that sucks the over 80,000 pounds of trash produced each day to backstage trash compactors.
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| Students take picture on tour |
We also learned interesting new facts about some of the more visible “upstairs” Disney secrets. As you walk down Main Street, you may have noticed some of the writing on the stores’ upstairs windows; this is what Disney World considers its “credits.” When you first walk in and look above the Confectionery, you see Roy Disney’s name. Roy, Walt’s brother and partner, helped start Disney World, taking care of most of the business’s finances. Walt in on the other end of Main Street, above the Ice Cream Parlor since he had a nightly bowl of ice cream. We also learned about the cues they use to transition between the different lands, such as changes in the sidewalk color and texture, different music, changes in decorations, and some less obvious and more symbolic details. For example in Liberty Square, the light-colored stone path throughout this section of the park, symbolizes towns before plumbing where waste was thrown into the street. Each branch of the stone path leads to a bathroom, all of which are technically outside of Liberty Square and in the next land. This is just one of the many details that helps to make the “show” by bringing guests back to pre-twentieth century United States. Overall the tour was an incredible experience, that exposed the hard work and detailed ingenuity needed to create such a magical destination.
The Math
The tour was far from the end of our day. We had lunch at the park and then returned to our hotel. After a quick 20 minute break, we were back at work. We had previously been split up into groups and assigned to read mathematical papers and present on the mathematical models they described. These papers related to various problems faced at amusement parks like Disney: optimizing hotel reservations, golf tours and crowd flow. These were peer reviewed papers published in respected journals, not aimed at undergraduate students. Mirroring last week, we, Hayden and Rahul, had contrasting yet similar experiences here. I, Hayden, am a rising sophomore Chemistry major, so before this I’ve had almost no experience reading mathematics journals. However, each of our groups included students with a wide range of experience with this type of work. Students like Rahul were able to explain some of the math notation and terminology that was new to me, so ultimately, I was able to fully understand the paper I had read. I, Rahul, am a rising senior Mathematics major, and have done Mathematical research both of my previous summers at Furman and have as a result have read a number of mathematical papers. However, reading a mathematics paper on an unfamiliar topic is always challenging, no matter your background, it took time and effort before I had any idea how the model worked. At the presentations today, it was clear that all three groups had put in a good deal of work and displayed a full understanding of the situations being modeled as well as the mathematics behind it: objective function being optimized, the variables and the constraints.
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| Planning locations of Waypoints |
Now that we had shown that we had a solid grasp of how mathematical modeling worked, we finally began what we hope will be our primary project for the remainder of the course. We are going to create our own model for optimizing tours of Disney World. Like with any other project, the key is to start small. The first step is to gather data about a small segment of the park. We will use our data gathered from the Epcot Challenge last Friday as a starting point. We plan to gather more information tomorrow while visiting the park and will combine this with data scraped from the internet. Rather than trying to calculate travel time between every single attraction at the park, we created a set of “waypoints” on the map of Epcot which will form the nodes of our graph. We will only need to know the travel times to the central node. Other travel times can be computed with this data using, for example, Dijkstra's Algorithm. Another advantage of using such a system with waypoints is that it is easily expandable, thus making for a robust model.
The Fun
About half the group chose to stay at the hotel this evening, but the rest of us decided to venture back into Disney, this time to Hollywood Studios. This was mostly just for fun, although we did try to test out a few theories we had developed about wait times, with some success. We finished up the night watching the fantastic Fantasmic! show, featuring everything from fireworks and lights to costumed actors and animations projected onto sheets of water. As we left the park, we noticed cast members closing the gates to Tower of Terror and Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. Just this morning, Megan had described Disney’s closing process of checking one attraction at a time and moving toward the main exit from there, and she assured us there was no way to hide out over night with this thorough shutdown plan. Dr. Harris, however, seemed to have taken this as a challenge and was working on an algorithm or two to solve this particular problem as we walked out.
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