Overhang

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Abstract: How far off the edge of the table can we reach by stacking n identical, homogeneous, frictionless blocks of length 1? A classical solution achieves an overhang of 1/2Hn, where Hn lnn is the nth harmonic number. This solution is widely believed to be optimal. We show, however, that it is, in fact, exponentially far from optimality by constructing simple n-block stacks that achieve an overhang of cn1/3, for some constant c>0.













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