8 ms·

Algorithmic fitting of Japanese candy

114 points by bemmu 10y ago

StephanTLavavej 10y ago
> From this it seems enough to only test combinations where two edges align. That can't be correct in general. Imagine a 9x9x9 cube, and nine 3x3x1 squares. This can fit into a 9x9x10 box, with the squares all on one side of the big cube. However, four of the squares will share only one edge with the cube, and one of the squares will share no edges with the cube.
- bemmu 10y ago
  Like this? http://imgur.com/a/61EnF http://imgur.com/a/61EnF I probably misunderstood, but it seems to work. "Align with edge" I meant aligning with any edge of any box which is already in play.
  - StephanTLavavej 10y ago
    Hmm, as long as you don't always use the big cube as the baseline, that works.
    - jtolmar 10y ago
      There are still cases it won't work; in fact, sometimes the optimal packing is pretty strange. For example, check the fifth optimal square packing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing_in_a_square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing_in_a_square
      - bemmu 10y ago
        Wow, that's a more bizarre case than I would have imagined. I started with the assumption that rotating them other than multiples of 90 degrees would never help, but looks like I was wrong.
        SerLava 10y ago
        Well to be fair, packing a physical good in that type of arrangement would often cause breakage of the diagonal object. So establishing flush edges seems like a good assumption here.
        jtolmar 10y ago
        There's also an upper bound on how bad an axis-aligned solution can be. And, on a less mathematical note, weird diagonal packings are counter-intuitive to everyone and you're not likely to get customers complaining that you packed inefficiently just because you missed an opportunity to use one.
aabajian 10y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like a convex optimization problem, assuming you know the sizes of the boxes and volume to pack them in. I think you could define a set of equality/inequality constraints and solve the problem efficiently. For further reading: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee364a/ http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee364a/
- blt 10y ago
  It's not. The intersection constraints are not convex. You could use sequential convex programming to find a local optimum. edit: to back up my claim: the feasible set of a convex optimization problem must be convex. suppose you have two squares of side length 1 at positions x1 and x2. The following two solutions are feasible: x1a = (-2, 0), x2a = ( 2, 0) x1b = ( 2, 0), x2b = (-2, 0) but their midpoint is not: x1c = (x1a + x1b)/2 = (0, 0) x2c = (x2a + x2b)/2 = (0, 0) therefore the feasible set is not convex.
esfandia 10y ago
As a student a long time ago I worked with a friend on a 2-d version of this problem for a client who had a framing store. He was trying to cut mirrors of certain sizes in large sheets while minimizing the waste. The approach we used was to start with a greedy best-first approach (like what is done by the Python library the author is using), and then try to improve on it by exploring the space of neighboring solutions. A "neighbor" here can be created by a pairwise permutation of candies (or mirrors in our case) in the order in which you're trying to fit them in the box, or trying to fit the candy flat instead of upright, etc. You can do a hill-climb, which means you keep going as long as you can find a better neighbor, or you can use simulated annealing, which accepts a degradation in the solution (to avoid getting stuck in a local optimum) with a certain probability. This probability decreases over time so that you can eventually converge to a solution. Simulated annealing will work better than hill-climb, but its stochastic nature means two runs of the program might give you two different solutions (our client thought that was a bug!).
- lotyrin 10y ago
  Yeah, simulated annealing as to the order to place objects in is probably optimal for non-trivial values of n. Also, determinism can often be important and stochastic doesn't have to mean non-deterministic - seed the RNG.
  - esfandia 10y ago
    Very true re: RNG seed.
  - kwhitefoot 10y ago
    > seed the RNG This is something that can't be repeated often enough! Especially when running unit tests.
sytelus 10y ago
BTW, I really like the concept of Candy Japan. But twice a month and $29 is too much. Hopefully they can get monthly or bi-monthly subscription soon.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I suspect shipping is the real problem. Here in Japan, while there are several shippers who give great service at low prices within the country, there are almost none that do the same for international shipping. I live in rural Japan in a famous tea growing area. Many of my neighbours are tea growers. They are desperate for ways to export their tea cheaply. I briefly looked into helping them out, but shipping looked impossible. They will sell me 100g of first cut shincha for $3-5 (in vacuum packed foil packages even!). But shipping? It will raise the price 5-10x. I bet the vast majority of his price is shipping :-( The way to ship internationally is by slow boat. It's super cheap. What you want to do is ship by the palette (or better by the container) and then have someone on the other side forward it on with local shipping. But that takes both volume and cooperation of another entity. For a small 1-2 person operation, it's infeasible.
  - bemmu 10y ago
    Exactly, especially now with yen being so expensive. For the past 6 months I've spent $29000 on candy and $26000 to ship it. If I used airmail with tracking it would cost 3 times as much.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      How come I can order something fairly heavy from China for $3 with free shipping? Of course they do WAY more volume than Japan, but it still makes no sense, it costs me more than that to ship it across town, and it's literally the same guy doing the local delivery.
      - revelation 10y ago
        All of the world's postal services have peering agreements, the same as for Internet traffic. See also http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese-shipping/ http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese...
enthdegree 10y ago
You have run into a monster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problems Packing of regular shapes in a confined space is hard enough... much less a general collection of cuboids in a 3D box. On the bright side, if you find a good way to do this you will have accomplished a lot more than packaging candy. Here is an annealing approach that might lead somewhere (although I'm not sure... I am no expert on packing and really smart people have been thinking about this for hundreds of years) Instead of thinking of sharp cubes as geometric objects, think about each one as a function from space to 0 or 1. (0 if you're outside the box, 1 if you're in it). Blur each cube function with a Gaussian, then try to position these blurry functions in your box so that they are well-separated. This positioning can be done using ordinary numerical optimization as a 'feasibility search': your objective function can be the maximum of the sum of the functions throughout the box, searching over the space of positions that lead to the cuboids being within the box's boundaries. You have to scale the blurred functions so that they all individually have the same max. Declare a positioning infeasible if the max of the sum is above the individual max. The positions you get from this will be a first approximation of where you should put your candies. After you've found the positions, reform your cube functions, this time using a sharper/thinner Gaussian. Then run the optimization again using the previous step's result as your first guess. The idea here is that hopefully the problem of shifting blurry functions around to be uniform is a lot easier than the strict packing problem which most people try to avoid solving. Also it's pretty amazing to me that you have made headway in this using Javascript. Good luck!
- adrianN 10y ago
  The trunk capacity of cars in defined as the number of a certain kind of box you can fit into it. Car manufacturers naturally want to maximize this number for their cars. Traditionally there are expert packers (pretty nice job if you ask me) who do this, but there are now some algorithmic approaches: http://www.joachim-reichel.de/publications/diss.pdf http://www.joachim-reichel.de/publications/diss.pdf
fpgaminer 10y ago
The very first line is "Candy Japan ships candy to subscribers twice a month." I read that and had to pause. Wow. I don't think if I tried for months that I could have done a better job describing _any_ business in such a small number of words. And that line and the last line are the only "marketing" this article does. It's subtle too, because the first line is completely necessary to introduce why the author wanted to algorithmically fit candy. It's just ... beautifully done. I'm not being sarcastic when I say any of that. Candy Japan has written a number of content-marketing articles and they're always informative and interesting. Obviously others agree because they bubble to the top of HN frequently. Candy Japan's articles should probably be mandatory reading for anybody wanting to start a small, online business, because this type of marketing is gold.
- philliphaydon 10y ago
  Lol I read that line and thought to myself "sold where do I sign up"
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  My only complaint is the "dark pattern" of not listing prices. There are prominent calls-to-action to enter your email address and sign up. I don't want to enter my email address unless I want to sign up, which is dependent on the price. "example@example.com" now has an email from Candy Japan, and I obviously can't click on the verification link there. After some digging, I found https://www.candyjapan.com/gift https://www.candyjapan.com/gift, which lists prices: 24 shipments! ($348.00, sent over one year) Dozen shipments ($174.00, sent over six months) Eight shipments ($116.00, sent over four months) Four shipments ($58.00, sent over two months) Two shipments ($29.00, sent over one month) Doing the math, it's $14.50 per box. Even though many levels are listed, there is no quantity discount, which is not obvious - I'm not good at multiplying 29 or 14.5 by powers of 2 in my head. If it was $20 or $30/month, that would be a little different. Some more digging with a disposable email finally brought me to https://www.candyjapan.com/subscribe https://www.candyjapan.com/subscribe, which shows that it's still $29/month whether gifting or subscribing. Furthermore, anyone can go to that page and see the price. No, the tiny "subscribe" link on the main page under the comic does not link there - it's an anchor to the email entry point. Perhaps A/B testing says differently, but I would like the business a lot more if there was a big label, above the fold, on the main page, that said "$14.50 per box" or "$29 per month".
arketyp 10y ago
We were presented with this problem in a course in constraint programming where we used a library called Gecode [2] to implicitly express and effectively search the solution space in terms of variable relationships/constraints. I remember symmetry breaking being a central concept [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming [2] http://www.gecode.org/ http://www.gecode.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry-breaking_constraints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry-breaking_constraints
- sfrank 10y ago
  Yes, but even better there is the global constraint geost [1] which is specifically for this purpose in k-dimensions; see also [2] for a more detailed presentation. Unfortunately, Gecode does not provide it (and you would have to express it in form of other, more lower level constraints which gets quickly complicated), and neither does Google's OR-tools which have a nice Python interface. There is JaCoP which provides the geost global constraint and makes it available via the declarative MiniZinc problem description language so one needs not to use the Java API. [1] http://sofdem.github.io/gccat/gccat/Cgeost.html http://sofdem.github.io/gccat/gccat/Cgeost.html [2] https://www.sics.se/~matsc/docent20090209.pdf https://www.sics.se/~matsc/docent20090209.pdf [3] http://jacop.osolpro.com/ http://jacop.osolpro.com/
jpatokal 10y ago
A friend of a friend used to work at NASA on how to pack the Space Shuttle, which is essentially the same problem... except that things need to be taken out in the correct order, through a small hatch, with a robot arm and in zero gravity. TL;DR: Packing candy is rocket science.
- conductr 10y ago
  Did he try to write an algo for that? This sounds like the kind of problem were I immediately decide that using some good ol' fashioned human rationale is the best way to proceed. Too many rules and conditions. Software is sometimes more difficult than its alternative.
phee 10y ago
As others have said, I would go with simulated annealing, or any non convex optimization algorithm you're more comfortable with. But first I'd investigate what's really the gain of closely packing the candies. Would shipment costs increase with a bigger non completely filled box? wouldn't a non rigid bag be better? Do non closely packed candies get damaged with shipment? Do customers prefer closely packed candies? I mean, let's say you get good enough local optimum configurations, then you have to exactly follow them packing the candies one by one... wouldn't it be easier to throw everything in a bigger bag and ship that?
- enthdegree 10y ago
  because it's cool
  - pc86 10y ago
    Yup. This is one of those things that 99% of customers will not notice. Some small percentage may prefer the closely-packed box over the bag but not be able to articular why. And some very small percentage will see it, recognize the difficulty in continuously doing something like this over the "throw it in a bag and ship the bag" approach, and think it's amazing. Those are the fans that will repost your stuff, talk about you to others, etc. This type of stuff is what creates the "1" in the 90-9-1 split.
- Dowwie 10y ago
  The only reasonable solution to this is to create a cnc machine that will pack the candy
- esfandia 10y ago
  There's something minimalistic and artful in trying to come up with the smallest packaging possible, which will probably appeal to the same people who enjoy Japanese candy, and Japanese culture in general. And it doubles up as a 3D puzzle for the user! Take everything out and try to put them all back in. And if you can't, just eat some of the candies to make it easier to solve.
myth_drannon 10y ago
There was a Kaggle competition on this subject a couple of years ago, plenty of interesting solutions : Packing Santa's Sleigh - https://www.kaggle.com/c/packing-santas-sleigh https://www.kaggle.com/c/packing-santas-sleigh
base 10y ago
Our company runs an SaaS shopping cart and we had to work in similar algorithms to estimate the size of the package when two or more products are packaged together, we would then send the sizes and weight of the total package to the different shipping carrier to get shipping estimates.
noahmbarr 10y ago
Sometimes hackers want to solve the hard problem, but not the most important problems. Check out some of the comments. This company might want redirect some focus on first principal issues like [1] consistently shipping 2 boxes a month to customers, [2] insuring the candy is of high quality, or [3] making sure basic user / subscription management works on their webapp. It takes discipline to direct resources at what will really move the needle the most.
- gwern 10y ago
  I agree. When I was re-analyzing one of CJ's experiments using Bayesian decision theory ( http://www.gwern.net/Candy%20Japan http://www.gwern.net/Candy%20Japan - speaking of wanting to solve hard but not important problems...) what I was struck most by was the incredibly high cancellation rates he was reporting. Clearly something is going wrong there.

114 points by bemmu 10y ago

> From this it seems enough to only test combinations where two edges align. That can't be correct in general. Imagine a 9x9x9 cube, and nine 3x3x1 squares. This can fit into a 9x9x10 box, with the squares all on one side of the big cube. However, four of the squares will share only one edge with the cube, and one of the squares will share no edges with the cube.

bemmu 10y ago
Like this? http://imgur.com/a/61EnF http://imgur.com/a/61EnF I probably misunderstood, but it seems to work. "Align with edge" I meant aligning with any edge of any box which is already in play.
- StephanTLavavej 10y ago
  Hmm, as long as you don't always use the big cube as the baseline, that works.
  - jtolmar 10y ago
    There are still cases it won't work; in fact, sometimes the optimal packing is pretty strange. For example, check the fifth optimal square packing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing_in_a_square https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_packing_in_a_square
    - bemmu 10y ago
      Wow, that's a more bizarre case than I would have imagined. I started with the assumption that rotating them other than multiples of 90 degrees would never help, but looks like I was wrong.
      - SerLava 10y ago
        Well to be fair, packing a physical good in that type of arrangement would often cause breakage of the diagonal object. So establishing flush edges seems like a good assumption here.
        jtolmar 10y ago
        There's also an upper bound on how bad an axis-aligned solution can be. And, on a less mathematical note, weird diagonal packings are counter-intuitive to everyone and you're not likely to get customers complaining that you packed inefficiently just because you missed an opportunity to use one.

aabajian 10y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like a convex optimization problem, assuming you know the sizes of the boxes and volume to pack them in. I think you could define a set of equality/inequality constraints and solve the problem efficiently. For further reading: http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee364a/ http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee364a/

blt 10y ago
It's not. The intersection constraints are not convex. You could use sequential convex programming to find a local optimum. edit: to back up my claim: the feasible set of a convex optimization problem must be convex. suppose you have two squares of side length 1 at positions x1 and x2. The following two solutions are feasible: x1a = (-2, 0), x2a = ( 2, 0) x1b = ( 2, 0), x2b = (-2, 0) but their midpoint is not: x1c = (x1a + x1b)/2 = (0, 0) x2c = (x2a + x2b)/2 = (0, 0) therefore the feasible set is not convex.

esfandia 10y ago

As a student a long time ago I worked with a friend on a 2-d version of this problem for a client who had a framing store. He was trying to cut mirrors of certain sizes in large sheets while minimizing the waste. The approach we used was to start with a greedy best-first approach (like what is done by the Python library the author is using), and then try to improve on it by exploring the space of neighboring solutions. A "neighbor" here can be created by a pairwise permutation of candies (or mirrors in our case) in the order in which you're trying to fit them in the box, or trying to fit the candy flat instead of upright, etc. You can do a hill-climb, which means you keep going as long as you can find a better neighbor, or you can use simulated annealing, which accepts a degradation in the solution (to avoid getting stuck in a local optimum) with a certain probability. This probability decreases over time so that you can eventually converge to a solution. Simulated annealing will work better than hill-climb, but its stochastic nature means two runs of the program might give you two different solutions (our client thought that was a bug!).

lotyrin 10y ago
Yeah, simulated annealing as to the order to place objects in is probably optimal for non-trivial values of n. Also, determinism can often be important and stochastic doesn't have to mean non-deterministic - seed the RNG.
- esfandia 10y ago
  Very true re: RNG seed.
- kwhitefoot 10y ago
  > seed the RNG This is something that can't be repeated often enough! Especially when running unit tests.

sytelus 10y ago

BTW, I really like the concept of Candy Japan. But twice a month and $29 is too much. Hopefully they can get monthly or bi-monthly subscription soon.

mikekchar 10y ago
I suspect shipping is the real problem. Here in Japan, while there are several shippers who give great service at low prices within the country, there are almost none that do the same for international shipping. I live in rural Japan in a famous tea growing area. Many of my neighbours are tea growers. They are desperate for ways to export their tea cheaply. I briefly looked into helping them out, but shipping looked impossible. They will sell me 100g of first cut shincha for $3-5 (in vacuum packed foil packages even!). But shipping? It will raise the price 5-10x. I bet the vast majority of his price is shipping :-( The way to ship internationally is by slow boat. It's super cheap. What you want to do is ship by the palette (or better by the container) and then have someone on the other side forward it on with local shipping. But that takes both volume and cooperation of another entity. For a small 1-2 person operation, it's infeasible.
- bemmu 10y ago
  Exactly, especially now with yen being so expensive. For the past 6 months I've spent $29000 on candy and $26000 to ship it. If I used airmail with tracking it would cost 3 times as much.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    How come I can order something fairly heavy from China for $3 with free shipping? Of course they do WAY more volume than Japan, but it still makes no sense, it costs me more than that to ship it across town, and it's literally the same guy doing the local delivery.
    - revelation 10y ago
      All of the world's postal services have peering agreements, the same as for Internet traffic. See also http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese-shipping/ http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese...

enthdegree 10y ago

You have run into a monster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_problems Packing of regular shapes in a confined space is hard enough... much less a general collection of cuboids in a 3D box. On the bright side, if you find a good way to do this you will have accomplished a lot more than packaging candy. Here is an annealing approach that might lead somewhere (although I'm not sure... I am no expert on packing and really smart people have been thinking about this for hundreds of years) Instead of thinking of sharp cubes as geometric objects, think about each one as a function from space to 0 or 1. (0 if you're outside the box, 1 if you're in it). Blur each cube function with a Gaussian, then try to position these blurry functions in your box so that they are well-separated. This positioning can be done using ordinary numerical optimization as a 'feasibility search': your objective function can be the maximum of the sum of the functions throughout the box, searching over the space of positions that lead to the cuboids being within the box's boundaries. You have to scale the blurred functions so that they all individually have the same max. Declare a positioning infeasible if the max of the sum is above the individual max. The positions you get from this will be a first approximation of where you should put your candies. After you've found the positions, reform your cube functions, this time using a sharper/thinner Gaussian. Then run the optimization again using the previous step's result as your first guess. The idea here is that hopefully the problem of shifting blurry functions around to be uniform is a lot easier than the strict packing problem which most people try to avoid solving. Also it's pretty amazing to me that you have made headway in this using Javascript. Good luck!

adrianN 10y ago
The trunk capacity of cars in defined as the number of a certain kind of box you can fit into it. Car manufacturers naturally want to maximize this number for their cars. Traditionally there are expert packers (pretty nice job if you ask me) who do this, but there are now some algorithmic approaches: http://www.joachim-reichel.de/publications/diss.pdf http://www.joachim-reichel.de/publications/diss.pdf

fpgaminer 10y ago

The very first line is "Candy Japan ships candy to subscribers twice a month." I read that and had to pause. Wow. I don't think if I tried for months that I could have done a better job describing _any_ business in such a small number of words. And that line and the last line are the only "marketing" this article does. It's subtle too, because the first line is completely necessary to introduce why the author wanted to algorithmically fit candy. It's just ... beautifully done. I'm not being sarcastic when I say any of that. Candy Japan has written a number of content-marketing articles and they're always informative and interesting. Obviously others agree because they bubble to the top of HN frequently. Candy Japan's articles should probably be mandatory reading for anybody wanting to start a small, online business, because this type of marketing is gold.

philliphaydon 10y ago
Lol I read that line and thought to myself "sold where do I sign up"
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
My only complaint is the "dark pattern" of not listing prices. There are prominent calls-to-action to enter your email address and sign up. I don't want to enter my email address unless I want to sign up, which is dependent on the price. "example@example.com" now has an email from Candy Japan, and I obviously can't click on the verification link there. After some digging, I found https://www.candyjapan.com/gift https://www.candyjapan.com/gift, which lists prices: 24 shipments! ($348.00, sent over one year) Dozen shipments ($174.00, sent over six months) Eight shipments ($116.00, sent over four months) Four shipments ($58.00, sent over two months) Two shipments ($29.00, sent over one month) Doing the math, it's $14.50 per box. Even though many levels are listed, there is no quantity discount, which is not obvious - I'm not good at multiplying 29 or 14.5 by powers of 2 in my head. If it was $20 or $30/month, that would be a little different. Some more digging with a disposable email finally brought me to https://www.candyjapan.com/subscribe https://www.candyjapan.com/subscribe, which shows that it's still $29/month whether gifting or subscribing. Furthermore, anyone can go to that page and see the price. No, the tiny "subscribe" link on the main page under the comic does not link there - it's an anchor to the email entry point. Perhaps A/B testing says differently, but I would like the business a lot more if there was a big label, above the fold, on the main page, that said "$14.50 per box" or "$29 per month".

arketyp 10y ago

We were presented with this problem in a course in constraint programming where we used a library called Gecode [2] to implicitly express and effectively search the solution space in terms of variable relationships/constraints. I remember symmetry breaking being a central concept [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_programming [2] http://www.gecode.org/ http://www.gecode.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry-breaking_constraints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry-breaking_constraints

sfrank 10y ago
Yes, but even better there is the global constraint geost [1] which is specifically for this purpose in k-dimensions; see also [2] for a more detailed presentation. Unfortunately, Gecode does not provide it (and you would have to express it in form of other, more lower level constraints which gets quickly complicated), and neither does Google's OR-tools which have a nice Python interface. There is JaCoP which provides the geost global constraint and makes it available via the declarative MiniZinc problem description language so one needs not to use the Java API. [1] http://sofdem.github.io/gccat/gccat/Cgeost.html http://sofdem.github.io/gccat/gccat/Cgeost.html [2] https://www.sics.se/~matsc/docent20090209.pdf https://www.sics.se/~matsc/docent20090209.pdf [3] http://jacop.osolpro.com/ http://jacop.osolpro.com/

jpatokal 10y ago

A friend of a friend used to work at NASA on how to pack the Space Shuttle, which is essentially the same problem... except that things need to be taken out in the correct order, through a small hatch, with a robot arm and in zero gravity. TL;DR: Packing candy is rocket science.

conductr 10y ago
Did he try to write an algo for that? This sounds like the kind of problem were I immediately decide that using some good ol' fashioned human rationale is the best way to proceed. Too many rules and conditions. Software is sometimes more difficult than its alternative.

phee 10y ago

As others have said, I would go with simulated annealing, or any non convex optimization algorithm you're more comfortable with. But first I'd investigate what's really the gain of closely packing the candies. Would shipment costs increase with a bigger non completely filled box? wouldn't a non rigid bag be better? Do non closely packed candies get damaged with shipment? Do customers prefer closely packed candies? I mean, let's say you get good enough local optimum configurations, then you have to exactly follow them packing the candies one by one... wouldn't it be easier to throw everything in a bigger bag and ship that?

enthdegree 10y ago
because it's cool
- pc86 10y ago
  Yup. This is one of those things that 99% of customers will not notice. Some small percentage may prefer the closely-packed box over the bag but not be able to articular why. And some very small percentage will see it, recognize the difficulty in continuously doing something like this over the "throw it in a bag and ship the bag" approach, and think it's amazing. Those are the fans that will repost your stuff, talk about you to others, etc. This type of stuff is what creates the "1" in the 90-9-1 split.
Dowwie 10y ago
The only reasonable solution to this is to create a cnc machine that will pack the candy
esfandia 10y ago
There's something minimalistic and artful in trying to come up with the smallest packaging possible, which will probably appeal to the same people who enjoy Japanese candy, and Japanese culture in general. And it doubles up as a 3D puzzle for the user! Take everything out and try to put them all back in. And if you can't, just eat some of the candies to make it easier to solve.

myth_drannon 10y ago

There was a Kaggle competition on this subject a couple of years ago, plenty of interesting solutions : Packing Santa's Sleigh - https://www.kaggle.com/c/packing-santas-sleigh https://www.kaggle.com/c/packing-santas-sleigh

base 10y ago

Our company runs an SaaS shopping cart and we had to work in similar algorithms to estimate the size of the package when two or more products are packaged together, we would then send the sizes and weight of the total package to the different shipping carrier to get shipping estimates.

noahmbarr 10y ago

Sometimes hackers want to solve the hard problem, but not the most important problems. Check out some of the comments. This company might want redirect some focus on first principal issues like [1] consistently shipping 2 boxes a month to customers, [2] insuring the candy is of high quality, or [3] making sure basic user / subscription management works on their webapp. It takes discipline to direct resources at what will really move the needle the most.

gwern 10y ago
I agree. When I was re-analyzing one of CJ's experiments using Bayesian decision theory ( http://www.gwern.net/Candy%20Japan http://www.gwern.net/Candy%20Japan - speaking of wanting to solve hard but not important problems...) what I was struck most by was the incredibly high cancellation rates he was reporting. Clearly something is going wrong there.