New Twist on Sofa Problem That Stumped Mathematicians and Furniture Movers | Hacker News Reader

New Twist on Sofa Problem That Stumped Mathematicians and Furniture Movers

blogs.ucdavis.edu

60 pointswolfgke7 comments

Being too thick (at least while on my phone) to link to an earlier HN comment, I'll take my chances reposting an anecdote from the previous time I saw the sofa problem surface on HN:

>(...) or out of the room, since someone already got in there so of course it must come out.

-Not necessarily; while a student, I looked after the apartment of a friend of mine, who was overseas. When he moved there, we were _just_ able to eke his sofa around the last corner from the stairwell and through the door to his apartment. Just. After much cursing and several failed attempts. So, what does a good (cough) friend do while the owner is overseas? Get some hardwood mouldings/trimmings/whatever you call those long, thin pieces of wood typically put where wall transitions to ceiling or floor and nail them to the exterior doorframes, making both door openings perhaps 3/8" or so narrower, paint them in the color of the doorframe, sit back and wait. Then, years later, as he is about to leave town, moving company comes along and everything runs smoothly until one item remains. The sofa. Obviously, it got in - so it'll (as obviously) come out. Only it doesn't. We (everybody except the owner and the moving guys were in on the joke) managed to keep a straight face for several minutes. The moving guys even laughed as they (eventually) left, mollified by a bottle filled with a Scottish export product which we'd kept on hand to ensure no feelings were hurt afterwards.

I had no idea that mathematicians were studying the Dirk Gentley problem! Ordinarily I have take doors off their hinges and remove the legs of the sofa to squeeze it through.

I once cut off the feet of an organ half way through the stairs.

It's 500 Internal Server Error for me.

Here's an archived copy: https://archive.fo/3Nq0R

This seems somewhat unrealistic as the shapes do not represent what most sofas look like unless you are into the custom funky sofa look.

I would think that we would be better served asking the more practical question of "what is the largest rectangular sofa that we can fit around any given corner?" Additionally, the article as presented does not appear to take the z-axis into consideration.

It's a math problem. It doesn't really have anything to do with furniture movers, that's just a hook to fool people that only care about math that has applications. Most modern math falls into this category, and math that applies to the real world is pretty well established and handled by the applied mathematicians and engineers.

Or just buy the sofa from IKEA :)

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