https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201207102055.htm

How can we maximize dough while cutting out Christmas cookies? How do we pack a suitcase or fill a kitchen cabinet while making the best use of space? One may have thought, "there must be a best way to do this." Pondering such questions too deeply now appears to be a complete waste of time. The science is now here to support that it is impossible, for the time being, to figure out what works best for more than four or five spicy gingerbread men or Christmas tree cookies.

Assistant Professor Mikkel Abrahamsen of the Department of Computer Science and two research colleagues studied how difficult it is to figure out the optimal way to pack objects in two dimensions without overlap -- a conundrum that computer scientists have plugged away at for decades.