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Comment by jojogeo | Hacker News Reader

Never have truer words been spoken, I too score poorly on DishwasherBench wife mode. Drives her up the wall.

At our place it's opposite, I guess when you do it often enough you get a preferred method though a relentless optimization loop, which in the end ensures it's all clean, the plates are well separated only in 1 particular order, the glasses are placed to the left so all small pans fit at the right, deep plates are placed half over cutlery rack so they are supported and more fit in, small plates in front so all lids fit before them... etc etc etc.

Yep, I have a more optimised model of stacking than my wife’s ideas. This has lead to “discussions” (still at a friendly level) and the dish washer being placed in my list of responsibilities.

I think optimal configuration is very much a NP complete problem.

Just because a problem is NP-complete doesn't mean it's infeasible to produce "good enough" approximate solutions. The traveling salesman problem is a great example of this.

Apologies, my OCD was showing.

It’s an interesting problem to pack the dishwasher with as many objects as possible and maintain the highest level of cleanliness. Sometimes, there’s an small thing leftover so then repack in a different configuration.

Not only that, the maximum n a dishwasher can hold is small enough that it can be fairly trivially solved within a reasonable amount of time...though to be fair, iterations are pretty slow, but I think that's fairly easily compensated for with axioms (silverware goes in the silverware spot)

Try explaining this to a raccoon.. on meth.

I did, once ;)

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