If you're not a fan of purely theoretical thought exercises, you can skip this post.

My degree is in computer science. One of the things we learned is what's called a binary search. Basically, the idea is that, when you're looking for an item, you can find it most quickly, on average, if you can eliminate half the remaining possibilities every step of the way. What this means for packing is you'd be most efficient packing exactly half your items in one sack and the other half in another. Then within each of those big sacks, the items are further divided into exactly half in two smaller sacks, and so on, down until the point where you only have two items in each sack.

Of course, in real life, this doesn't really work out so well because of the overhead of opening up (and repacking) extra sacks, but if you're going to be packing things in individual stuff sacks anyway, it might (?) pay off to alter your packing scheme, just ever so slightly, with this principal in mind.

Anyone feel like trying it?