We all would like to get it just right. Our soup should not be too hot so as to avoid “leather tongue”, or too cold, because cold chicken soup does nothing for the soul. Driving either too fast or too slow on the highway is illegal and dangerous. Shoot the basketball too softly and it does not reach the rim, too hard at it clangs off the backboard. There is a narrow range of force and angle for which you will score, and with practice, you can find that optimized scenario with regularity.
Goldilocks is not the only person interested in finding the optimal bed or porridge. It is in fact the primary concern for an engineer to look at a design problem, and optimize its parameters. The goal is to design a prototype whose safety, mass, volume, cost, and delivery time fall within an appropriate domain. The optimization problem that ensues may be thought of as a search for balance. A computer scientist may view this as an interpolation algorithm, perhaps a bisection code, being run until a satisfactory solution is found.
