“Overhang”, Mike Paterson, Uri Zwick2007-10-12 (math; backlinks)⁠:

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 1⁄2H_n, where H_n ln n is the n^th 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 cn^1⁄3, for some constant c > 0.

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