In normal times, we are amused at the phenomenon in which people have a nagging question in their everyday lives which they try to solve in the geekiest manner possible. We call that "overthinking." In 2020, people have more time to indulge in those personal missions. Ethan Rosenthal is a physicist and a data scientist in New York City, so he's had plenty of time to think about his favorite sandwich, made with peanut butter and bananas.
I start a peanut butter and banana sandwich by spreading peanut butter on two slices of bread. I then slice circular slices of the banana, starting at the end of the banana, and place each slice on one of the pieces of bread until I have a single layer of banana slices. Every time I do this, the former condensed matter physicist in me starts to twitch his eye. You see, I have this urge, this desire, this need to maximize the packing fraction of the banana slices. That is, I want to maximize the coverage of the banana slices on the bread. Just as bowl-form food is perfect because you get every ingredient in every bite, each bite of my sandwich should yield the same golden ratio of bread, peanut butter, and banana.
If you were a machine learning model (or my wife), then you would tell me to just cut long rectangular strips along the long axis of the banana, but I’m not a sociopath. If life were simple, then the banana slices would be perfect circles of equal diameter, and we could coast along looking up optimal configurations on packomania. But alas, life is not simple. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic, and banana slices are elliptical with varying size.
So, how do we make optimal peanut butter and banana sandwiches? It’s really quite simple. You take a picture of your banana and bread, pass the image through a deep learning model to locate said items, do some nonlinear curve fitting to the banana, transform to polar coordinates and “slice” the banana along the fitted curve, turn those slices into elliptical polygons, and feed the polygons and bread “box” into a 2D nesting algorithm.
Read how he did exactly that, in excruciating detail, in a study of the optimal way to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich. You could say it's bananas. -via Metafilter