CS professor Chris Okasaki, known for his book on purely functional data structures, also played board games and he came across this phenomenon. He realized that it could be modelled as a bipartite matching problem, and wrote a MUCH faster program to manage math trades.

https://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-heck-is-math-trade...

I guess it can be made even faster now in theory.

For those unfamiliar: NC is the class of problems which can be solved in polylogarthmic depth with polynomial number of logic gates. It is unproven if NC != P similar to P != NP.