Let's suppose that you are given three buckets fulls of little marbles.  The
first bucket contains red marbles with a radius of 1 unit.  The second bucket
contains blue marbles with a radius of pi/4 and the last bucket contains green
marbles with a radius of pi/6.  If you are given and empty box that is cubic and
has a volume of 10^6 cubic units then how may we pack the marbles in the
interior of this smooth and perfect box in a most efficient manner?  What is the
least effecient manner that is stable?  Can this be solved in an deterministic
manner or are numerical methods required?

Now there you have a problem that would be useful for a program like Pov-Ray. 
Why?  Because the visualization of crystalline lattice patterns is a useful tool
for most physics labs and having multiple spheres of different dimensions is far
more likely in real materials.  A more interesting application still would be
the modeling of a DNA or RNA fragment based on a given gene sequence.  Thus if I
give the program GATTACA then perhaps we can visualize the fragment structure? 
There is a little chemical joke in that movie title by the way.

Any way, there are a number of Java applets that already do this with Java3D but
I think that the cpu overhead is really massive.  You need a pile of Sun servers
to render in any kind of reasonable time frame.

Have a crack at the marble problem... what are your thoughts?

Dennis Clarke

ps: I don't have the solution offhand, but I'm sure that it can be solved ....

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