this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 12 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

It's important to note that while this seems counterintuitive, it's only the most efficient because the small squares' side length is not a perfect divisor of the large square's.

[–] curiousaur@reddthat.com -3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Did you comment this because you think the people here are stupid?

[–] dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

Bro, the people here, like the people everywhere, ARE stupid.

It's always better to be explicit. I'm one of the stupid people who learned some things reading the comments here and I've got a doctoral degree in aero astro engineering.

[–] jeff@programming.dev 9 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

What? No. The divisibility of the side lengths have nothing to do with this.

The problem is what's the smallest square that can contain 17 identical squares. If there were 16 squares it would be simply 4x4.

[–] Natanael@infosec.pub 12 points 18 hours ago

He's saying the same thing. Because it's not an integer power of 2 you can't have a integer square solution. Thus the densest packing puts some boxes diagonally.

[–] sga@lemmings.world 3 points 18 hours ago

this is regardless of that. The meme explains it a bit wierdly, but we start with 17 squares, and try to find most efficient packing, and outer square's size is determined by this packing.