Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by pricees | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

pricees

I tried writing one of these about 10 years ago and failed miserably.

It was a generalized banquet hall/dinner/wedding seating chart.

The one that I was looking to write involved the following specs:

- friends and +1s sit together

- guests could sign up as a "group" (Tom's group) and sit together

- cluster people from the same area, or not even close to the same area

- some guests need to be prioritized as close to the front of the room/stage/guest(s)-of-honor

These were very difficult specs to satisfy and not getting it right was not an option since folks were paying $50 a plate with ~600 guests. The solution has always been to do it by hand.

View on HN

I agree there's going to be some hand curation. That's why this tool was meant to help iterate over solutions, and not prescribe. You can lock people in.

Also, thanks for the specs. I was thinking of some of those things, but really glad to hear how you thought about it!

I haven't clustered people together yet in terms of physical location, because I don't have a way to express table locations yet in the UI. Trying to keep it "just simple enough". But I know it's important for many people.

If you have any more insights, I would love to hear it!

I'm wondering if a constraint solving library like optaplanner could help here - believe it uses simulated annealing.

Hey, maybe a use case for Dwave? j/k.

This is precisely what optaplanner was designed to do. Note the optaplanner has been forked by its original author and main contributor when they left RedHat/IBM. The fork is called "TimeFold", most development happens there now.

> The fork is called "TimeFold", most development happens there now.

Thanks. Last time I used optaplanner was several years ago on an aerospace project - if I need a constraint solver again I'll definitely look at TimeFold.

Yea Optaplanner is pretty good. It's definitely gotten better over the years in terms of usability, especially with Constraint Streams.

Trivia: The first major public demonstration of D-Wave used a modified version of our PerfectTablePlan table planner software to show how D-Wave could solve a real world optimization problem. https://www.perfecttableplan.com/newsletters/newsletter10_we...

Nice. I sat through a sales presentation/demo by D-Wave once. Very interesting, though limited to a particular class of problems.

Heck, the copy on their homepage is a big clue:

"Our customers are building quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, portfolio optimization, drug discovery, materials sciences, scheduling, fault detection, traffic congestion, and supply chain management. What problem can we help you solve?"

You have to REALLY need it to spend the money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com