A Note on Mascarenhas' Counterexample about Global Convergence of the Affine Scaling Algorithm

Mascarenhas gave an instance of linear programming problems to show that the long-step affine scaling algorithm can fail to converge to an optimal solution with the step-size λ=0.999 . In this note, we give a simple and clear geometrical explanation for this phenomenon in terms of the Newton barrier flow induced by projecting the homogeneous affine scaling vector field conically onto a hyperplane where the objective function is constant. Based on this interpretation, we show that the algorithm can fail for "any" λ greater than about 0.91 (a more precise value is 0.91071), which is considerably shorter than λ = 0.95 and 0.99 recommended for efficient implementations. Accepted 17 February 1998