Box filling algos are rough. Working in ecomm for many years and trying to optimize costs, you spend a lot of time thinking about these kinds of problems. Apparently Amazon's answer is "F it" as they send massive boxes for tiny things frequently.
Slightly related, I worked in the sign printing industry for many years as well. There we also had fitting algorithms for ganging vector designs into runs for printing and cutting on large format printers. Those are a lot easier since it's 2D only, but they are still hard to get to perfection.
Yeah it's crazy when you think about it. We somehow manage with new break through on voice, image, and speech recognition but yet we still struggle figuring out how to efficiently pack things in a box or plate.
Slightly related, I worked in the sign printing industry for many years as well. There we also had fitting algorithms for ganging vector designs into runs for printing and cutting on large format printers. Those are a lot easier since it's 2D only, but they are still hard to get to perfection.