Arithmetic has a concept to deal with the problem produced by the negative numbers. And they are. Row c and row b slope in different ways, as well as being different in size of numbers. Try a and b, which slope the same way. Unfortunately I did.
Manhattan pays too much attention to size and too little to slope.
I made an excel spreadsheet that will calculate the Manhattan Distances between rows or columns of up to 25 cells. Called manhat.xls . The Brainerd-Robinson statistic was invented by a statistician in team with an archaeologist. The place of chronological 0rdering in archaeological analysis. The Brainerd-Robinson statistic uses percentages to make the strings add up to the same number, and then compares the strings using Manhattan.