L-R: Lazy Bureaucrat Researchers "Kicking Back"; Joseph Mitchell, Steven Skiena, Michael Bender, Esther Arkin

How do you develop schedules for workers whose goal is to complete the least amount of work possible?

It’s an age-old problem and the question behind a study by four Stony Brook University professors, which was cited in a recent article of the United Kingdom newspaper The Guardian.

The study by Esther Arkin and Joseph Mitchell of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Michael Bender and Steven Skiena of the Computer Science Department was published in 2003 in the journal Information and Computation. The team characterized their study of “The Lazy Bureaucrat Scheduling Problem” as: [continue reading…]