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 James Crook, an American computer scientist has come up with a foolproof algorithm that’ll let you solve a Sudoku problem without straining your brain.

Only takes an hour, he reckons.

Now, I’m no Einstein, but I can do one in about 5 minutes. If that.

Enter Boring Old Fart mode

I once did a project in the early 90’s with a bunch of brainy buggers from a private university. They reckoned that they could help us optimise the whole cargo business, so off they went.

A month or so later, they came back with a formula that would help us choose the best combination of boxes to maximise the volume utilisation of a 10 cubic metre cargo container.

The presentation was a classic.

Utterly clueless about the business, never even thought of looking at a cargo terminal or even a cargo container, let alone the sort of stuff that gets shipped as cargo.

“We’ve taken a typical cross section of cargo boxes” said the brain “That would be 7 standard sized boxes”

We give each other a WTF look.

On she drones.

“So there’ll be an equal number of these 7 standard sized boxes available for shipping and we’ve worked out the absolutely optimal selection of boxes to fill the container” she proudly proclaimed.

“And it’ll only take 3.7 x 10 to the power of 16 minutes” she said. (Something like that, anyway)

Very impressive.

We later worked out that it was around 2 years…..

This is what the real world is like:

The warehouse foreman will look at all the cargo lined up for the flight (and there sure as hell aren’t any “standard sized containers”), walk around it and say ” OK, this goes at the bottom at the back, this one’ll slot in next to it, put this at the front and the rest of it’ll fit in on top. Use the small stuff to fill in the gaps.”

0.5 x 10 to the power of 2 seconds.

Just under a minute.

Exit Boring Old Fart mode