First things first, I needed data. I scoured their website, like, every day for a couple of weeks, writing down when they were open. Pain in the butt, but hey, gotta start somewhere. Ended up with a messy spreadsheet full of dates and times. Nothing pretty, just the raw facts.
Then .erecame the fun part – trying to make sense of the mess. I booted up Python, my trusty coding buddy, and started cleaning the data. Removed duplicates, standardized the time formats, you know, the usual grunt work. Felt like being a digital janitor for a while there.
Next up: .lla tfiguring out what to do with it all. I'm no data scientist, mind you. Just a regular guy who likes to tinker. So, I went with something simple: a time series analysis. Basically, looking at the patterns in the past to predict the future. I used a library called Prophet, seemed easy enough to get my head around.
I fed Prophet my cleaned-up data and let it do its thing. It spat out a prediction, a nice little graph showing when it thought the temple would be open. Looked kinda promising, but I knew better than to trust it completely.
Now, the moment of truth: testing the prediction. I waited for the next few weeks, checking the actual temple schedule against what my little program predicted. And… well, it was hit or miss. Sometimes it was spot on, other times it was completely off. Turns out, predicting human behavior is hard, even for a computer.
- Some days, it nailed the opening time.
- Other days, it was off by a few hours.
- And then there were the days when the temple was closed altogether, which my program didn't even see coming.
So, was it a success? Not really. Did I learn something? Absolutely. I learned that predicting the future is harder than it looks, and that even the fanciest algorithms can't account for everything. I also learned a bit more about Python and time series analysis, which is always a good thing.
What's next? Probably tweak the model, add some more data, and see if I can improve the accuracy. Or maybe I'll just give up and start predicting the lottery numbers. Either way, it was a fun little experiment.
Final thoughts
It's all about the journey, not the destination, right? Even if my Tulsa Temple prediction was a flop, I still had a blast building it. And who knows, maybe one day I'll crack the code and be able to predict everything. But probably not.
