the first paper was written when the K-means method was not yet widely known and, except for the mechanical interpretation, was probably not so different from. You can see that the focus is in the efficiency of the algorithm due to resource scarcity at the time. The second paper is an attempt to avoid predefining the number of clusters. Their number is found studying the potential wells of a gravitational field where the point inter-distance is a negative exponential of a Manhattan distance. My previous attempts with a plain Newtonian force was hindered by the "black hole" phenomenon due to points so near that the gravitational force becomes too great making them to start drifting through the space.
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