Suppose you want to pack two suitcases with objects of weight a, b, . . . , z. You want to pack them as close to evenly as you can. It can be shown that this is a virtually impossible problem. Despite fifty years of effort, we don’t know how to find the best method of packing, save for trying all of the exponentially many possibilities.
Wow, that is indeed a nice example. It also reminds me of a problem I had to solve at work. I failed to Google up an existing solution, but I figured that was just due to my ignorance of proper terms to describe it. Now I’m not so sure.
Wow, that is indeed a nice example. It also reminds me of a problem I had to solve at work. I failed to Google up an existing solution, but I figured that was just due to my ignorance of proper terms to describe it. Now I’m not so sure.
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem