(222 PONTIFICIAE ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARVM SCRIPTA VARIA - 2¢ 
With regard to Prof. DorFMAN’s intervention I believe I got the 
sense of what he said when he compared my approach with his own. 
He would rather prefer to take as a starting point some sort of 
optimal solution, and then subsequently proceed to a discussion with 
the politicians perhaps using a sort of iterative procedure in this 
discussion. On this score there is, I think, a very little difference 
between Prof. DORFMAN’s point of view and mine. It is simply a 
question of how best to shape the interviewing technique. 
Prof. DorFMAN also mentioned the possibility of presenting dif- 
ferent described alternatives to the politician and letting him 
choose between them. Possibly, that is not precisely Professor 
DorFMAN’s point of view, but it is certainly the point of view of 
somebody else around this table. So I think it merits being drawn 
into our discussion. This is a very natural view point, a very simple 
one. The idea is that the experts should work out different alterna- 
tives. These alternatives should be listed on a big sheet of paper or 
perhaps each alternative on its own sheet of paper. And then all 
these sheets of paper should be put on the politicians table and the 
scientific expert should say: « Now, please, out of these alternatives 
choose the one you like. » 
To me, this is an absolutely impossible procedure and I will 
explain why. You can use this method if you have a very very 
small model with two, three or four variables, because then the 
aumber of possible alternatives is so small that the situation can be 
grasped. But if you have a real programming problem with hundreds 
of variables and thousands of possible alternatives, as you will have 
for instance in an under-developed country that strives towards in- 
dustrialization with a long list of investment projects, you will find 
that the method of listing alternatives can produce nothing but com- 
plete confusion. You would simply be facing what an expert mathe- 
matical programmer would call information death. You would be 
killed by the amount of information. 
You must proceed in another way, you must proceed in such 
a way that the computing machine takes over the task of keeping 
:race of all the alternatives. If you are going to do that, there is 
17] Frisch - pag. 26