One of the notable speakers was Michael Trick. Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), author of 40 professional publications but most famous amongst laymen (with the assistance of his colleagues) for toppling the husbandand- wife team responsible for scheduling all of America’s Major League Baseball (MLB) games for over 20 years.
It’s one of the most fascinating human interest stories to come out of operations research. When the number of teams and games became too much for MLB’s then Harry Simmons to schedule alone – who had similarly been producing the schedules for 20 years – it was Henry and Holly Stephenson who stepped up to the plate in 1982. While they originally got the job based on their computer bona fides, their ultimate system turned out to be largely manually created with a bit of assistance from their own computer program. The Stephenson’s managed to fend off multiple competitors throughout their career – and most notably Trick for almost a decade – producing a workable schedule for 30 teams playing just over 2 100 games across 180 days year on year.
This included a host of specialised requirements regarding travel, rest days, special requests from all the teams and more beside. That the Stephensons generated a workable schedule from all this, largely by hand, is commendable. But it makes one wonder about the millions of solutions that may have been left out, which is exactly where operations research, with the benefit of computer-assisted optimisation, thrives.
On Trick’s own blogpost, he wrote about a short documentary video entitled The Schedule Makers, which details the contributions made by the Stephensons and their inevitable loss of the job in 2004. He states that one of the reasons it took so long to top the Stephensons was the computers and the algorithms they used to produce schedules weren’t yet fast enough or advanced enough to produce them timeously.
One of the highlights from The Schedule Makers was about the 2013 schedule, in which Mariano Rivera, considered one of the finest players in recent memory, finishing his career in Minute Maid Ballpark – a notable but not exactly high-profile location for American baseball.
The documentary implies that the human element, the ‘story’, is lost with the adoption of a combinatorial optimisation system, a point Trick argues is paramount to predicting the future, given that teams have to submit their requirements almost two years in advance.
Where am I going with all this? More than anything, I believe the story is illustrative of the constant tension between experience, qualifications and technology, and the balancing act that’s required in all three areas to remain relevant.
The Stephensons had the experience and a knack for sport scheduling but failed to capitalise on their experience once Trick entered the picture. While I’m not sure about the Stephensons’ qualifications, it’s clear that neither lacked insight or intelligence. A lack of flexibility was their downfall: Holly states, “I did kind of resent the computers coming in, because they’re not artwork. Whatever they are; I have no idea how you would use advanced combinatorial optimisation software to create a schedule.” That lack of understanding is tragic.
Similarly, Trick – despite his doctorate in industrial engineering and subsequent post-doctoral fellowships – was unable to leverage his knowledge or use of computers to give him the edge until 2005. And even today, such as the schedule produced in 2013, it can’t always cater for the human element, the ‘fair’ schedule that’s anything but, which ‘experience’ would step in to correct.
In his same blogpost, he concludes “Another way to see this is that in 1994, despite my doctorate and my experience and my techniques, I was one millionth of the scheduler that the Stephensons were. Henry and Holly Stephenson are truly scheduling savants, able to see patterns that no other human can see. But eventually technological advances overtook them.”
To add comment, email rick.de.klerk@opsi.co.za
Pic credit: Frederick Dennstedt
