This seemingly no-brainer of a task becomes more intellectually interesting than what you may think on first contact (pun intended). More so when you have to d

This seemingly no-brainer of a task becomes more intellectually interesting than what you may think on first contact (pun intended). More so when you have to distinguish between the different types of overlap and non overlap and carry through the reasoning over a chain of overlap/no-overlap relations. I sure underestimated it. The one dimensional case is covered(there you go again) by Allen algebra. The more richer notion is that of topological relations. I will find the Wikipedia pages and post. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen%27s_interval_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen%27s_interval_algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_connection_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region_connection_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_relation https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DE-9IM https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DE-9IM Interval trees, range trees help if you have a large static set of interval like objects against which you have to relate a query object.