This document summarizes a talk on energetic lattices and braids. It discusses using energetic lattices as a theoretical basis for dynamic programming approaches to optimization problems on hierarchies of partitions. It also discusses braids of partitions, which generalize partitions to allow for multiple optimal solutions, and how they preserve the dynamic programming structure and energetic ordering. Future work is proposed on handling hierarchies that are not totally ordered by refinement, and on multi-class graph cut algorithms.