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Everybody here is drawn to the picking of the colors. But the optimization of the different sized pieces also seems like a very fun problem to work on!

And taking the step to actually getting out of the digital world is something everybody should probably do more often!

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This is indeed an interesting problem. If you just want to minimize the number of rectangles there is a neat solution on stackoverflow [1] that uses minimum vertex cover (equivalently, bipartite maximum matching).

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/6634668

But the goal here really isn’t to minimize the number of pieces used. It is to minimize total cost of covering the space. This makes things much more complex as it turns into some weird variant of a knapsack problem.

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