Origin of a story about a computer in the 50's recommending offing Pensioners There's a story I've heard a few times in various computer science talks, usually offered as a cautionary tale, that goes something like this:

In the late 50s, the British gov't purchased an early computer, and tried to build a computer model of the gov'ts budget, including every variable and factor they could think of.  They then had it run an analysis to find the best ways to save money.  The surprising result was they should decrease spending on traffic lights and cross-walks.
This confused the researchers, since these items were a very small fraction of the total budget, much less then what the computer claimed could be saved by eliminating them.  Upon further examination, they found that the source of the savings wouldn't be due to the direct cost of traffic lights, but were due to the increase in pensioners being killed trying to cross the street, thus saving the gov't X millons of dollars.

Even if the story is apocraphyl (which I sort of assume is the case) does anyone know what the original source is?
The story is clearly made up. 

There was no AI in the 1950's that could have come up with that. 

There is no AI today and for many years that could come up with that. 

Actually, an AI wouldn't come up with this idea at all. You would need a very well calibrated combination of AI and AS (Artificial Stupidity) to achieve this result.