Imagine packing your car to go on a holiday. Probably there’s one person in your family that has the 3-D intuition needed to work out how to fit the suitcases just so, so that there’s a nook free here to fit a pair of boots and a cranny free there to fit the odd-shaped gift you’re bringing along to Aunt Mathilda. That one person always does the packing; the rest of you stay out of the way until the car is packed.
Such packing skills can be highly valued in certain industries, as it is not an easy task to make an algorithm that will do it perfectly. Variants are known as bin fitting, bin packing ...
