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sniffnoyThe following is taken from my Theory of Algorithms textbook (Kleinberg and Tardos):
"Scrhiver (2002) provides an interesting historical account of the early work by Ford and Fulkerson on the flow problem. Lending further support to those of us who always felt the Minimum-Cut Problem had a slightly destructive overtone, this survey cites a recently declassified U.S. Air Force report to show that in the original motivating application for minimum cuts, the network was a map of rail lines in the Soviet Union, and the goal was to disrupt transportation through it."
Wow. I'm going to see if I can look up that reference...
UPDATE: Here's Schriver's paper. So while the Russians were trying to find a maximal flow on their railway network, the Americans were trying to find a minimal cut! At the end there's a map with the cut Ford and Fulkerson found displayed, labeled "the bottleneck". So, if you ever want to disrupt railways in Eastern Europe, you know where to hit.
Unrelatedly, someone finally removed that bit in the Spellbound article on Wikipedia about Tufts House and "3:00", with the comment "Removed inappropriate anecdote". I'm surprised that took so long - I thought that rather obviously didn't fit (considerably worse than the whole "Eugene Leypunsky" thing).
-Harry
"Scrhiver (2002) provides an interesting historical account of the early work by Ford and Fulkerson on the flow problem. Lending further support to those of us who always felt the Minimum-Cut Problem had a slightly destructive overtone, this survey cites a recently declassified U.S. Air Force report to show that in the original motivating application for minimum cuts, the network was a map of rail lines in the Soviet Union, and the goal was to disrupt transportation through it."
Wow. I'm going to see if I can look up that reference...
UPDATE: Here's Schriver's paper. So while the Russians were trying to find a maximal flow on their railway network, the Americans were trying to find a minimal cut! At the end there's a map with the cut Ford and Fulkerson found displayed, labeled "the bottleneck". So, if you ever want to disrupt railways in Eastern Europe, you know where to hit.
Unrelatedly, someone finally removed that bit in the Spellbound article on Wikipedia about Tufts House and "3:00", with the comment "Removed inappropriate anecdote". I'm surprised that took so long - I thought that rather obviously didn't fit (considerably worse than the whole "Eugene Leypunsky" thing).
-Harry
