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Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

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Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#51

Post by haroldp »

noduerme wrote: post #44
maweki wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably an optimization problem with multiple parameters so you're never looking for an exact solution. But as the NP-hardness of that problem goes: Say you have 400 guests on 50 tables and you probably expect multiple solutions, you're looking at maybe 20K variables in a SAT encoding. That's an industrial scale SAT problem but very much not untractable. The question is, whether we would usually expect a number…

I had to write a piece of code to manage 200+ dogs at a kenneling facility, sorted by temperament, across a Gantt chart, with lists of friends and enemies which could stay together or must never be together - coming and going at different times. Additionally, dogs and kennels are both color-coded and certain types of dogs can only stay in certain types of kennels. Some dogs cannot share a kennel at all; kennels have…

I was once asked to code a people-matching function where participants had long "don't match me with her" lists and coded a very naive brute force solver that absolutely pegged the CPU on my dev box until I wised up that it was an NP-Hard problem.

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#52

Post by noduerme »

haroldp wrote: post #51
noduerme wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to write a piece of code to manage 200+ dogs at a kenneling facility, sorted by temperament, across a Gantt chart, with lists of friends and enemies which could stay together or must never be together - coming and going at different times. Additionally, dogs and kennels are both color-coded and certain types of dogs can only stay in certain types of kennels. Some dogs cannot share a kennel at all; kennels have…

I was once asked to code a people-matching function where participants had long "don't match me with her" lists and coded a very naive brute force solver that absolutely pegged the CPU on my dev box until I wised up that it was an NP-Hard problem.

Yeah, that's a different and larger problem space. A reservation-maximizing algo doesn't need to come up with a solution for all-vs-all, it only needs to solve for the new reservations you're trying to book vs what's already there; essentially one-vs-all. As it is, searching the tree can take 1-2 seconds in-browser on reasonable hardware, and that's with a good deal of pruning. Trying to massively re-optimize the whole calendar after the fact would be undesirable anyway, considering there are a lot of human choices being made along the way.

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#54

Post by teejae »

huevosabio wrote: post #53

Love this. I got married in 2022 and I started a "friend and family graph" with the goal of optimizing layout. But other stakeholders, cough cough in laws cough , quickly demanded direct allocation.

Haha! How many people attended? Would your in-laws have been able to use this type of tool?

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#55

Post by thom »

Bit of a blast from the past for me, as we used Perfect Table Plan when we got married. I heard about that from its creator Andy Brice who frequented the Joel on Software forums, a spiritual precursor to HN.

https://www.perfecttableplan.com/

Anyway, we used it to get _most_ of the way there, but ultimately reverted to hand crafting stuff at the end. For us there were many constraints that were vague feelings, only coming to light when we had a plan in front of us, and if you end up doing many rounds of tweaks you lose any real efficiency gain from using software.

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#56

Post by bruce511 »

verelo wrote: post #48
teejae wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the great feedback! I agree with versions mattering. At the top, there's every version right now. Probably needs better UX. Yea, I agree with adding attributes. I wasn't sure if most people would understand that UX. But it's on the roadmap, in lieu of groups. Yep, dupes are definitely a thing. There's lots of places where everyone has the same names, though, so it could get annoying. Think Bali (5 names cy…

Ah yeah i see the versioning now. I didnt get what was happening there before but i do now. This feels more to me like an audit log, which while helpful doesnt really do what i had hoped. Seeing 1 person move at a time isnt super practical, our edits were more like "these 10 people are now in different spots" and i just want to compare before to after, the in between while interesting isn't the visual im hoping to di…

Wedding Planners seems like the ideal target market for this. It's a task that must be a opinion for wedding planners, since the couple have to do it, and they put it off (cause its hard).

Making it friction free for the couple (the planner pays, the couple use a planner assigned login), plus making it easy, allows the planner to gather the information from the couple, and then keep pushing plans at them.

A simple guest-list integration (suggested, invited, rsvpd) seems like the next step, and I expect diet requirements etc.

Then again I expect this software already exists and existing planners already use it, so this route may be full. Do some research first.

I agree that "plan your own wedding" .com would be hard to sell because it's one-time customers so acquisition cost us high, and lifetime value per customer is low. So best done as a side-project.

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#57

Post by pugworthy »

Do you account for not putting right handed people to the right of left handed people? But then maybe you do, if you want to play match maker.

So many (imagined) social conditions here. Like A likes B, but B hates A. C and D should meet. E and F are a couple, but F and G broke up in college so it's awkward. H and I are divorced but still on good terms so it's OK. etc.

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#58

Post by Brajeshwar »

Ok. This may be slightly off-topic, but I'm pretty serious when I suggest getting feedback and ideas from an Indian aunty/uncle who has done and helped arrange or take primary roles in weddings in their families. Here in India, for all significant events, there is always an aunt/uncle who knows everything, and everyone asks that person.

Looking at the website and seeing Tables numbered less than ten by default, I realized this targets people who invite their best friends and relatives and strictly choose who they want to see at their events.

One of my friend’s father was that uncle. I once asked him how he knows everything and can organize everything. He writes a lot and writes them down and refers to those writing when he thinks. If I asked him something, he is thinking about his notes in the back of his mind. Once, he gave me directions to go and send out over 50 paper invitation cards. My journey was precise and in perfect sequence, including the cow traps to avoid, the gates I might encounter, and the homes with dogs (so I call out before entering). This is in the 90s, with no phone, while I ride a bicycle to deliver those invites with no marked address on roads I had never traveled, in an Indian rural town.

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#59

Post by jsdwarf »

verelo wrote: post #42

My wife and i just went through this for our wedding. A few remarks from that experience that might be helpful: 1. Versions matter - she'd often make a draft and want to tell me "ok tell me if you like this better than the previous version". Id just compare the cells above to the cells below. 2. We organized people based on common interests - these people are very into music, these are very into home renovations, the…

Also think about the negative case - which people should not sit on the same table because they don't get along too well or will start a neverending dialogue?

Re: Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer

#60

Post by teejae »

jsdwarf wrote: post #59
verelo wrote: post #42

My wife and i just went through this for our wedding. A few remarks from that experience that might be helpful: 1. Versions matter - she'd often make a draft and want to tell me "ok tell me if you like this better than the previous version". Id just compare the cells above to the cells below. 2. We organized people based on common interests - these people are very into music, these are very into home renovations, the…

Also think about the negative case - which people should not sit on the same table because they don't get along too well or will start a neverending dialogue?

Yep, there's already a way to select guests and keep them separated in the UI. Give it a try and lemme know what you think!
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