Convoy Speed

Ships travelling in convoy have to move at the speed of the slowest ship to stay together.

Yes, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the protection offered by the mass of ships in the convoy provides sufficient compensation.

See T.W. Körner, ThePleasuresOfCounting, ISBN 0-52-156823-4 for (among other things) a very good explanation of convoy policy during the two World Wars. Actually, read the book for itself; it's great. His book, Fourier Analysis, ISBN 0-52-138991-7 is wonderful too.

--EricJablow

I hope you liked the diagrams in "The Pleasures of Counting". (See the penultimate paragraph of the preface.) --GarethMcCaughan

See Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice, ISBN 0870215582 for the evolution of naval tactics from the "ships of the line" to modern carrier battlegroups. Protection of the slowest ship is often the reason the faster ships were built. The second edition (out in 1999; the first was 1986) is Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, ISBN 1557503923 .

Doug Lenat and his AI software found an improvement on this in the Trillion Credit Squadron competition. If you fire on and sink your own slowest ship (presumably it's not a valuable ship), the speed of the convoy increases.

-- David Wolff

But one would hope that applying this strategy in the context of PairProgramming would seem excessive even to PairProgrammingDoubters?.

An explanation: one of the supplements for the SF role-playing game by GDW, Traveller, was Trillion Credit Squadron, describing fleets of warships built on a trillion credit budget. (US trillion, not French: 10^12.) Rules were given for having such fleets fight each other. GDW held a tournament at the Origins national wargaming convention in the 1980s, and Doug Lenat used the resources of Xerox PARC to design his fleets. One strategem he discovered was to fire at and destroy his own ships slowed by damage in order to keep his fleet speed up. When they banned that trick after the tournament, he found another one. Eventually, they banned him. Oh, and see http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/microLenat.html for another view of Doug from the JargonFile. -- EricJablow

This was with Eurisko, correct? Yes.

Eventually, they banned him? According to accounts on the internet, the tournament organizers threatened that if he entered again, they would cease to hold the tournament!