True Shape Nesting 00: introduction to the new series

"The philosophical point of the game Tetris is that mistakes accumulate." (I. L. Vikentiev)

A few months ago, a comrade of mine pointed me to a website named the "True Shape Nesting Project." This was a blog written by someone who was developing a 2D nesting algorithm from scratch. Back then, I did not sit down to read the blog on a self-promise to return to it when I had more time. And now it is no longer available. Such a waste.

Describing your journey as it unfolds is a fascinating genre. Personally, I would have been quite interested to learn how a sophisticated tool like xNurbs (whatever) was created, step-by-step. One may argue that such stories are full of garbage because the things you're trying out might not always be smart or even correct. But that's the whole point of a story. There is no drama in an academic paper. Reading an article on someone else's fancy algorithm gives you absolutely no insight into what it took to get a great result. You just see the crowning achievement: the beast had been caught, no matter how difficult the chasing process was. But what's intriguing is how that actually happened. How long has it taken? Which tools were employed, and which were not appropriate for the job? What types of mistakes have been made, and why? Did the author feel desperate at times?

Long story short, here we are, at the zeroth milestone of Yet Another 2D Nesting Project. It will become a series of posts that I do not intend to revisit and polish in the future to keep the original spirit of the journey as it is. These "nesting notes" will be brief and raw because it's less about writing and more about trying. Let's start.

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