Nice, but it's just the same thing that mine and Gilles' macro do with trig.
Even if it looks so, it would be really physically correct if you considered
the weight of the books and the friction between book and book, and book and
ground. Your macro checks if a book touches another one, but cannot say if
the weight of that book makes the previous book fall or not. The physics
formulae to be used here are quite simple, but I really don't have such
programming skill to turn them into a macro. In your macro, for example, I
guess a random position is chosen, then the book is rotated until it touches
the previous one. At this point, a physically correct macro, should check if
that configuration is possible, i.e. if the book is balanced. If not, the
macro should try with another random position (or maybe with very little
translations). The problem here is that the balancing of the book depends on
the following books also, so that building a whole balanced shelf would
require a lot of parsing time, which for these porpouses is not worth it
(IMHO).
BTW, your approach to the problem is quite clever. After all you managed to
avoid all that trig formulae ;-) .
Can't wait to see your entry.

--
Jonathan.

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