The mechanism behind booking a ride on your phone is actually really complex

Every time you click to book a ride on the Grab app, the machinery that clicks in the background crunches some serious numbers to pair you with a driver.

It's "staggeringly complex," as Grab's head of engineering, Ditesh Gathani, put it in an interview with Mashable.

Underneath the seemingly simple process of booking, the system has to achieve a few goals, such as: providing the passenger with a driver, at reasonable cost within minutes; and to do this with as few buttons to press, and fields to fill in as possible.

It also runs predictive analytics in real-time to figure out where demand will be, so the app can tell drivers where to go in the next few hours. Add that to machine-learning, with the system figuring out your routine and filling in where you want to go on some days. Read more...