this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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I wonder what the optimal packing of 17 hexagons looks like
I just woke up with my phone on this. My assumption is that remembering that optimal packing thing just caused me to pass out, presumably to protect myself.
Does it haunt your dreams the same way it haunts mine?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Should the target area be square or should it also be a hexagon?
I've legit been thinking about this since i posted the comment lol. I think the target area should probably be a minimal regular hexagon, but I honestly dont have the mathematical chops to figure it out myself or to know which would be more interesting.
Intuition tells me to either try to reduce the problem to like convex hull or figure out a reasonable way to generate random packings and just monte carlo it a few million times for a close to optimal solution. A reasonable way to generate random packings feels like it would be way harder to implement than it sounds
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