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Comment by dzolob | Hacker News Reader

For our wedding, I asked my now wife and a few friends and relatives to fill a “guests’ distance matrix”, where 0 equaled superclose friends and 5 complete strangers, and from a random initial layout, it bruteforced random swaps between guests untill reaching minimum distance configurations. It was a pretty dumb algorithm, but it took into consideration table capacity, party size and closedness of tables.

Of course, the wife rejected most of the outcomes, but it did decide some of the tables, spitted out interesting sittings and it helped us doing the global layout.

At the end, the overall feeling was that everyone was close to their loved ones. The energy was fantastic and everybody had a great time.

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Organizing the seating arrangements at our wedding was such a pain. I remember we suggested doing "self seating" where everyone could just eat wherever they chose, and it was like I suggested inviting Satan himself to host the ceremony. My mom and Aunts shot that down SO FAST.

Sure it was!

I think letting me do the algorithm and looking at the results was her loving way of getting me out of the way.

We did self-seating, and it worked out great. Many of the tables were exactly what we would've chosen, like "spouse's work friends", but it also let us avoid sticky situations like "number of aunts and uncles don't easily divide by the size of the tables". We wound up with great hybrids like "several cousins but also one aunt and uncle".

Later I learned that decades earlier two brothers had stopped speaking forever over a misinterpretation of the searing arrangement at a family event - it was meant to be a table of "close family", but the attendee assigned there thought it was "the kids' table".

But IMO sitting with everyone you already know is boring, one of the interesting thing about weddings is meeting new people...

An alternate strategy for seating -

For our rehearsal dinner, we had maybe ~30 people, and did a 4-course meal.

For each course, everyone was assigned different tables, such that over the evening, everyone would get at least one course with everyone else

I got married last year and tried something similar using a MIP optimization problem. It came out reasonably close to what we had done by hand.

I did find https://www.improbable.com/news/2012/Optimal-seating-chart.p... as part of that process. It documents the formulation of the problem well

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