The techniques involved are both generic and highly non-trivial. So the paper is very nice in that it gives a good work-out to the methods, and the reader can g

The techniques involved are both generic and highly non-trivial. So the paper is very nice in that it gives a good work-out to the methods, and the reader can get to see what kind of problem would yield to those methods. For example it appears that similar kinds of "objects touching each other" problems could be attacked. But yeah, it's basically a monster polynomial that they solve, and that is quite a common thing to want to do. On the other hand, one might see a paper that expounds a technique, but how do you know if that technique has got any teeth unless you can use it to eat a difficult problem? So yeah, I think the specific problem is not quite the point of this research.