>>8Right. This restriction means
atop
is right-associative, where the ``intuitive'' interpretation as
>>6 puts it is non-associative, which is clearly inefficient regardless of the problem domain.
This doesn't mean the whole needs to be considered more than the parts though, since
A atop (B atop C)
is easily decomposable in the same way any formula is.
In addition, the way ``any 10-year-old'' would figure it out likely doesn't work for a collection of
n blocks randomly piled around, nor is it describable as an algorithm (it's just intuition).