The best part about these sorts of problems is learning about heuristics. I spent years as a self-taught developer without using heuristics, and once I got the opportunity to use them, it made so many things make more sense, like why do Mathematicians and Physicists take shortcuts instead of doing all the work to do the problem correctly? Because you reduce time by limiting complexity! Big O notation never resonated with me, but I can look at loops, recursion, and just think about problems and say “That will take too long.” With heuristics, you eliminate that. It was eye-opening.

So, good for the author that they spent the time to learn path optimization. Now onto 3D bin packing!