[OT] Retreating from Iraq AT THE SAME TIME

[Russell Lewis]

The solution here is just like what happens in real life at my company 
when a major reorg is happenning:

* President calls, and all officers call their subordinates immediately, 
until the sergeants hear about it.  Then they wait.
* At a predetermined time (when enough time has elapsed for all 
sergeants to have heard the news), all sergeants call all of their 
platoons at the same moment.
* All of these calls at once overload the VOIP system, which promptly 
crashes.
* Realizing that a VOIP crash generally means that major news is coming, 
all privates log onto the Drudge Report and find out what is going on.

:)

Basic idea is that sergeants can wait arbitrarily long, so you put the 
onus on them to hold the info until the predetermined time.

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Let's reconsider the problem of retreating from Iraq, with a twist.
> Grace to new technology, teleconferencing is now possible. All direct
> subordinates of any officer can be called SIMULTANEOUSLY. So there is no
> more need for one officer to call each subordinate in sequence; he or 
> she will call them all at once. Cool!
> 
> However, now the demands also increased. Your task, should you yadda
> yadda, is to devise a schedule for teleconferenced such that EVERY rank
> and file soldier finds the news at EXACTLY the same time. That means you
> must insert some delays in the system. However, you should insert as few
> delays as possible, and also to ensure there is minimal global delay
> from the moment the President picks up the phone to the moment soldiers
> get the news.
> 
> Be warned: this is quite a different problem than the previous one in
> spite of the similarities. You may want to start from scratch instead of
> adapting an algorithm suitable for the previous problem.
> 
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> Andrei