How often do people travel between non-ground floors though? In my own experience, whether it's a residential or an office building, 99% of elevator usage is a) someone going down to the ground floor, and b) someone going up from the ground floor. There are some exceptions like hotels that have amenities on different floors though.
The first elevator "algorithm", if you can even call it that, that I've ever encountered and that seems intuitive to me, is what Soviet relay logic elevators did. If it's not in use and someone calls it, it goes there. If it's in use, it will collect the calls on its way down (and ignore them on the way up, these had no up/down call buttons). It's surprisingly effective for apartment buildings.
I was confused by this "LOOK" algo... I'm American and I've lived all over the place, and I'm not familiar with elevators that pick you up on the way up if you pushed the down button. As far as my experience, they only pick you up on the way back down. To the extent that if I did hit the down button and got in and it went up, I'd think I'd gotten in the wrong elevator or there had been a mistake.
It depends on the building use. In residential buildings, people do tend to go to / from ground but in my building the parking garage has entrances on levels 1-4, the gym on 3-4 and the garden on 5. That distorts the traffic pattern.
The company where I work occupies an entire office building, so there is lots of travel between floors.
Not sure how common it is but Bern train station has 3 elevators, usually 2 are set to normal and one to "express" which means all middle floors (mainly parking) are locked and you can only go ground to top (outside so a lot of people going to/from the station on foot)
It's super efficient for people who understand the system at the detriment of people who don't, as they get in and mash the middle buttons and get confused that they don't activate
Having visible, pressable buttons that do nothing is terrible UI. Why not just screw a metal plate over these do-nothing buttons, or at least tape a piece of cardboard?
It's extremely common in an office building I used to work in. The office has 21 floors and people shuffle between them often. Going up or down 1 or 2 floors there are stairs. Also the top 11 floors use different elevators than the bottom 11. They share 1 floor so you can switch
The first elevator "algorithm", if you can even call it that, that I've ever encountered and that seems intuitive to me, is what Soviet relay logic elevators did. If it's not in use and someone calls it, it goes there. If it's in use, it will collect the calls on its way down (and ignore them on the way up, these had no up/down call buttons). It's surprisingly effective for apartment buildings.