sum to no more than B, which is the capacity of the bins. In the standard physical interpretation, we view the items of a subset as having been packed in a bin of capacity B. This problem is NP-Hard =-=[3]-=-, so research has concentrated on algorithms that are merely close to optimal. For a given list L, let OPT(L) be the number of bins used in optimal packing, and define: s(L) = d P jI j j B e (1) Note