Mad but true… According to New Scientist (14 March 2009) the Tetris algorithm is helping mathematicians research ways of packaging goods into fewer, smaller spaces!
Obviously this’ll eventually be a great help to delivery firms like us who are always interested in making the most of space. And it’ll benefit our customers too. But fitting objects into the smallest amount of space is such a complicated mathematical problem that researchers haven’t yet managed to figure out the single best way to pack more than twenty-ish objects at one time.
Imagine that. We’ve landed on the moon and sent machines to Mars but we still can’t calculate optimum packing strategies. Isn’t maths weird.
“We now have an algorithm which is able to solve packing problems with 3D goods of different sizes in general,” says Joannes Schneider, who heads the research team at the University of Mainz. Schneider is also taking the order in which objects are packed into account. “For example, the driver of a parcel delivery service must not unload half of his truck in order to get to the parcel which he should deliver to the next customer,” he says.
We’re not mathematicians, by any means, and we don’t play a great deal of Tetris. But we’re well acquainted with how tricky it can be to pack a load of different shaped and sized things into a restricted space. That’s our job. You’d be amazed how much stuff we can fit into our removals vehicles, with their tardis-like properties. Perhaps we could teach the scientists a thing or two?!
Tags: europe removals, home removals