
Ask HN: What branch of CS does this recipe problem belong to? - Jefro118
I find that I waste a lot of food. As a side project, I&#x27;m trying to come up with some meal plans that will combine preexisting recipes such that there is minimal waste left over. E.g. I use some of ingredient X in recipe 1, and then some in recipe 2, etc. There are constraints set by the size of the units my supermarket sells the ingredients in.<p>Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start with this problem (I can code but don&#x27;t have a CS background). I&#x27;m trying to start by finding out what domain it belongs to. Is it linear programming? Would machine learning be useful here?
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Someone
It’s a variation on bin packing
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem),
[http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Bin-
PackingProblem.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Bin-PackingProblem.html))

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Jefro118
Thanks, I had come across this but didn't want to go too deep until I was
confident it was the right way to frame the problem.

