[OT] Retreating from Iraq

[Bruce Adams]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:50:30 +0100, Russell Lewis  
<webmaster at villagersonline.com> wrote:

> -3.2 seconds.  It will be on the Drudge Report before the president  
> picks up the phone.
>
> Seriously, though, the algorithm is as follows:
>
> - Give each private a "cost" of 0, since he has no calls to make
> - Iterate through the list of superiors, starting with the lowest
>    level and working upwards:
>    - Sort the superior's subordinates by their cost, from greatest
>      cost to least.
>    - The superior will plan to call his subordinates in this order
>    - The "cost" of the superior is equal to
>         max (over subordinates si) i + cost(si)
>      That is, each term in the max() is teh cost of the subordinate,
>      plus his order in the list.  The total cost of this superior is
>      the time from when he makes his first call, until the last
>      private in his tree is notified.
>
> This works because of two points:
> 1) The cost of a given officer notifying his tree doesn't depend on
>     his upper heirarchy.  Thus, we can build the values from bottom up.
> 2) If an officer calls any high-cost subordinate after any lower-cost
>     subordinate, then that obviously will make the tree finish later
>     than in my suggested order.
>
> Russ
>
You can improve on this if you are allowed to issue temporary field  
promotions
or use minions to dispatch orders. You can then send information side-ways.
Of course, the military would never go for that. It would break the chain  
of command.
The closest you get is "fire at will". Poor Will, he always gets caught in  
the crossfire.