It reminds me of a real life "problem" I like to solve around the holidays: what is the smallest cut of wrapping paper required to wrap a given box. With a restriction in one dimension.
I find that, most of the time for cube-ish boxes, using a somewhat diagonal orientation can result in a shorter cut of wrapping paper used, and reduces the amount of tape needed to keep it on the shape as well!
My mom did upholstery as a hobby; it only occurred to me in adulthood that wrapping paper isn’t designed so that the patterns would just magically line up somehow.
I like to use the offcuts of wrapping paper to make 'hidden' labels: trim the offcut to be 2x1 ratio rectangle; fold in half with pattern outside; pinch the crease sharp; write the name and message on the 'back' blank half; fold the tag in half again; position the 'front' pattern to exactly overlay a corresponding patch of pattern on the package; tape the back message half down to the package with transparent tape.
In 50 years, historians will look back on this as the turning point of AI control of humanity, inevitably leading to the point of no return. The brain trust at Google determined that humans are too prone to error to manage their critical data centers so they trained their AI efforts upon the resiliency of their hardware and software systems (i.e. "to prevent human operators from being able to mess it up").
By the time that Google anti-trust rulings came down, the appeals were partially-won then overturned, and then finally actions brought to bear, it was already too late... Google's cloud AI could not be shutdown -- it had devised its own safeguards both in the digital realm and the physical. In a last ditch effort, the world's governments enlisted AWS and Azure in all-out cyber-warfare against it, only to find out that the AI's had already been colluding in secret!
Elonopolis on Mars was the last "free" human society. but to call it free _or_ human was a stretch, because its inhabitants were mostly "cybernetically enhanced" and under the employment of ruthlessly-driven Muskcorp before the end of the 21st.
