ALAN: Alan Hoffman
IRV: Irvin Lustig
IRV
What other kind of work did you do at the National Bureau of Standards?
ALAN
One of our projects involved supplying equipment to the armed forces. At that time there was an organization called ASTAPA whose purpose was to buy supplies for the services. Here's an example: The army needed 25,000 tents and a request for bids was issued to manufacturers. Now, it was a little complicated for the following reason - the army needed these tents in different quantities and in different warehouses around the country, and the cost of shipping the tents fell to the government. Also, the manufacturers often had different prices depending on the quantity ordered and shipment location. Oddly enough, the price would go up with the increase of quantity rather than down. This offended me as a citizen but pleased me in terms of computing the problem because it made it possible to use certain techniques for the transportation problem, which would've been difficult had there been a decrease in cost.
Well, someone had heard about us and realized that, in principle, this was a transportation problem. So, we went up and worked on it. For a while we couldn't find out anything. We couldn't get anything from the accountants who were in charge of this work because they sensed, I think quite properly, that technological unemployment was around the corner.
IRV
Were you able to work with the accountants to solve the problem?
ALAN
One guy helped us out and then we entered in a socialist competition with the accountants. We competed with them on 10 bids. They solved these problems by informal iteration. Accountant A would do the best he could before handing the result to Accountant B, who would work to see if he could beat Accountant A, and so forth, until they converged. We were using the simplex method.
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