Here’s a much more elegant solution for 17
Is this confirmed? Like yea the picture looks legit, but anybody do this with physical blocks or at least something other than ms paint?
You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.
With straight diagonal lines.
Homophobe!
hey it’s no longer June, homophobia is back on the menu
Why are there gaps on either side of the upper-right square? Seems like shoving those closed (like the OP image) would allow a little more twist on the center squares.
there’s a gap on both, just in different places and you can get from one to the other just by sliding. The constraints are elsewhere so wouldn’t allow you to twist.
Oh, I see it now. That makes sense.
I think this diagram is less accurate. The original picture doesn’t have that gap
You have a point. That’s obnoxious. I just wanted straight lines. I’ll see if I can find another.
I hate this so much
Oh so you’re telling me that my storage unit is actually incredibly well optimised for space efficiency?
Nice!
if I ever have to pack boxes like this I’m going to throw up
I’ve definitely packed a box like this, but I’ve never packed boxes like this 😳
https://kingbird.myphotos.cc/packing/squares_in_squares.html
Mathematics has played us for absolute fools
If you can put the diagonal squares from the 17 solution in a 2-3-2 configuration, I can almost see a pattern. I wonder what other configurations between 17 and 132 have a similar solution?
Bees seeing this: “OK, screw it, we’re making hexagons!”
Fun fact: Bees actually make round holes, the hexagon shape forms as the wax dries.
4-dimensional bees make rhombic dodecahedrons
Bestagons*
Texagons
If there was a god, I’d imagine them designing the universe and giggling like an idiot when they made math.
Can someone explain to me in layman’s terms why this is the most efficient way?
These categories of geometric problem are ridiculously difficult to find the definitive perfect solution for, which is exactly why people have been grinding on them for decades, and mathematicians can’t say any more than “it’s the best one found so far”
For this particular problem the diagram isn’t answering “the most efficient way to pack some particular square” but “what is the smallest square that can fit 17 unit-sized (1x1) squares inside it” - with the answer here being 4.675 unit length per side.
Trivially for 16 squares they would fit inside a grid of 4x4 perfectly, with four squares on each row, nice and tidy. To fit just one more square we could size the container up to 5x5, and it would remain nice and tidy, but there is then obviously a lot of empty space, which suggests the solution must be in-between. But if the solution is in between, then some squares must start going slanted to enable the outer square to reduce in size, as it is only by doing this we can utilise unfilled gaps to save space by poking the corners of other squares into them.
So, we can’t answer what the optimal solution exactly is, or prove none is better than this, but we can certainly demonstrate that the solution is going to be very ugly and messy.
Another similar (but less ugly) geometric problem is the moving sofa problem which has again seen small iterations over a long period of time.
All this should tell us is that we have a strong irrational preference for right angles being aligned with each other.
Lol, the ambidextrous sofa. It’s a butt plug.
For two!
Now I want to rewatch Requiem for a dream.
Requiem is the best movie that I’ve only wanted to watch once.
It’s also a great name for a cover band.
Butt rock covers of gospel songs perhaps?
Thanks for the explanation
It’s not necessarily the most efficient, but it’s the best guess we have. This is largely done by trial and error. There is no hard proof or surefire way to calculate optimal arrangements; this is just the best that anyone’s come up with so far.
It’s sort of like chess. Using computers, we can analyze moves and games at a very advanced level, but we still haven’t “solved” chess, and we can’t determine whether a game or move is perfect in general. There’s no formula to solve it without exhaustively searching through every possible move, which would take more time than the universe has existed, even with our most powerful computers.
Perhaps someday, someone will figure out a way to prove this mathematically.
They proved it for n=5 and 10.
And the solutions we have for 5 or 10 appear elegant: perfect 45° angles, symmetry in the packed arrangement.
5 and 10 are interesting because they are one larger than a square number (2^2 and 3^2 respectively). So one might naively assume that the same category of solution could fit 4^2 + 1, where you just take the extra square and try to fit it in a vertical gap and a horizontal gap of exactly the right size to fit a square rotated 45°.
But no, 17 is 4^2 + 1 and this ugly abomination is proven to be more efficient.
Any other configurations results in a larger enclosed square. This is the most optimal way to pack 17 squares that we’ve found
Source?
Bidwell, J. (1997)
Seriously?
In the meme.
It crams the most boxes into the given square. If you take the seven angled boxes out and put them back in an orderly fashion, I think you can fit six of them. The last one won’t fit. If you angle them, this is apparently the best solution.
What I wonder is if this has any practical applications.
There’s very likely applications in algorithms that try to maximize resource usage while minimizing cost
yeah it vindicates my approach of packing stuff via just throwing it in there. no I’m not lazy and disorderly, this is optimal cargo space usage
It’s a problem about minimizing the side length of the outer rectangle in order to fit rectangles of side length 1 into it.
It’s somehow the most efficient way for 17 rectangles because math.
These are the solutions for the numbers next to 17:
That tiny gap on the right is killing me
That’s my favorite part 😆
Is this a hard limit we’ve proven or can we still keep trying?
We actually haven’t found a universal packing algorithm, so it’s on a case-by-case basis. This is the best we’ve found so far for this case (17 squares in a square).
Figuring out 1-4 must have been sooo tough
It’s the best we’ve found so far
Do you know how inspiring documentaries describe maths are everywhere, telling us about the golden ratio in art and animal shells, and pi, and perfect circles and Euler’s number and natural growth, etc? Well, this, I can see it really happening in the world.
It is one prove more, why it is important to think literally out of the box. But too much people of this type
