Useful for CNC work- stock (plywood boards, sheets of maple, whatever) is expensive, and if you're making lots of irregularly shaped parts, the solvers for this will quickly find good approximate solutions that can save a lot of stock.

Huh, interesting read. Hadn't heard of it. Sort of reminds me of an algorithms/sorting methods class I took a long time ago. I wonder if lessons from CS/algorithms could be cross-applied to it? Or the reverse.

DeepNest[1] looks really interesting, I think I will definitely be trying this next time I have a project involving cutting out anything.

[1]: https://deepnest.io/