Solving the Box Selection Algorithm

<p>When I joined&nbsp;<a href="https://shotput.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Shotput</a>&nbsp;in February, I knew I was going to get to dive deep into development. It&rsquo;s a small team with some tough problems to solve, and I was really excited to flex my newly acquired programming skills and simultaneously continue to develop as a software engineer. What I hadn&rsquo;t yet realized was that I would get the opportunity to take on a non-trivial algorithmic problem and solve it: box packing.<br /> <br /> Think about it for a second. At first it seems like there is a simple solution to the problem: s<em>ee if a product fits, if it does, put it in the box, if not, use a different box</em>. But then you realize you have to think about dimensions, rotations, packing more than one item at a time, and shipping costs. With so many variables, runtime exponentially increases which means you have to apply smart optimizations. In other words, it reduces to a well-known computer science problem called&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Knapsack</a>.</p> <p><a href="https://medium.com/the-chain/solving-the-box-selection-algorithm-8695df087a4"><strong>Click Here</strong></a></p>