Video Excerpt

IRV
At Rand, were there any applications with which you were personally connected?

PHIL
There were several. To a large extent, we were acting as free consultants to people from some industries. The oil industry was the big earliest source of interest.

For a couple of years I worked with the Kern County Land Company. They had to feed a herd of 10,000 to 20,000 cows every day. They came to Rand, having heard about linear programming, and asked if we could help with the classic diet problem.

The dieticians have a whole set of requirements about how much salt, protein, carbohydrates, and a bunch of other ingredients their cows should ingest. They wanted to go out in the market every week, look at the current foodstuff prices, and make the best deal they could.

I took their weekly data for about a year, put it into our computer, and gave them answers about how they should feed the cows. It was kind of fun, my first practical computation.

The Rand Corporation was a wonderful place to work. Almost all my time was spent on algorithmic research, finding ways to improve the simplex algorithm. My only requirement was to do useful stuff, preferably in the areas of linear programming and game theory, even though that wasn't a strict constraint. And I took advantage of that to explore in quite a few directions.

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