fitting rectangles in the smallest possible area

Question

IOI 95

The six basic layouts of four rectangles

Four r

Answer 1

While google does turn up some solutions, I guess some high level description will enable you to solve this on your own.

You can start by naming the rectangles in each of the 6 layout cases 1,2,3,4. Then you should be able to calculate the bounding box for each of the layouts for given instances of rectangles 1...4 (hint for the first case: width=sum of widths of 1...4, height=max of heigths of 1...4)

Then, as you said, you can try all possible combinations of naming four given rectangles with the indices 1...4 plus for each such possibility try out all possible rotations, and determine the minimum over all such possibilities in all layout cases.