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YOU have heaped your shopping on the supermarket conveyor belt and a friendly member of the checkout staff is scanning it through. Items are coming thick and fast and you would like to get them in as few bags as possible. What is your strategy?
This is an example of an optimisation problem, from an area of maths called operational research. One important question is, what are you trying to optimise? Are you thinking about the weight of the items, or how much space they will take up? Do you guess how many bags you might need and start …