While I was making my daily cheese sandwich the other morning, I got to thinking about the optimal algorithm for slicing cheese.
I use a Swedish cheese slicer for my cheese slicing needs. This works great until you get to the end of a block of cheese - if you are careless and always slice the same side, you are likely to get a large thin block of cheese which is almost impossible to slice any further on the wide side but which is still too thick for sandwich purposes. You then need to slice it on one of the long thin sides, which leads both to long thin slices of cheese, and to a block of cheese that is still long in one dimension but short in the other two.
So it seems that the ideal algorithm is to always slice the cheese on the smallest side, so that the shape of the block always approximates a cube (of gradually shrinking size). But that means that you're always rotating the block - you really want to get a few slices out of a side before you rotate, and there must be some optimal rate of rotation to minimize both fiddliness and rotation. You also get a number of very small slices of cheese at the end of a block, but in practice this does not seem to be a big problem.
Yes, I know I put too much thought into this.