Pizza Time

Unfinished; posting anyway. Pizza and 2+1 offers go together like Apache Airflow and data engineering: Nobody knows why, but it is a thing. The premise is deceptively simple: Buy three pizzas and get the cheapest one for free. (More like 3-1 if you ask me, but I’m not a marketing guru.) “Nothing complicated” you might think, and if you are a monster that can eat three pizzas in one sitting (shout out to my past self) or a small family and your pizza consumption patterns end at three pizzas, you are mostly right. But if you are one of my 2 regular readers (hi mum 👋), at this point you probably suspect we will try to find problems where others seek delicious satisfaction. Let’s start simple. Maximizing Savings Faithful to the tradition of the spherical cow we will ignore delivery/packaging/… costs. Given a group of people wanting to buy pizzas priced π=(p1,p2,p3,⋯,pn)∈ℝ+n\pi = (p_1, p_2, p_3, \cdots, p_n) \in \mathbb{R}_+^n, how to form groups of three to maximize our savings with 2+1…