A seating plan that checks its own rules SEATING

The hard part is the constraints, not the arranging

Everybody solves seating with sticky notes on a kitchen floor, and the arranging is genuinely the easy half. The difficulty is that the constraints live in people's heads (these two have fallen out, this one needs to be near a door, those three came together, that one cannot sit with their back to the room), and they are held by different people, none of whom is looking at the plan at the same moment.

So the failure is always the same. Somebody moves one name to fix one problem and creates another four tables away, and nobody notices until the day, when it is a real problem involving real people who have travelled to be there.

Writing the constraints down is therefore the whole tool. Once they are written, the arrangement is checked against all of them continuously and every breach is named, so moving a name cannot quietly break something else. That is a different and much more useful guarantee than an arrangement that happened to be right when it was made.

The automatic pass is a convenience, not the answer

It seats the most constrained people first, which is the heuristic that works for this kind of problem: the person who must be near a door, must not sit with two others and came with a third has very few valid seats, and placing them last means undoing work. Getting the awkward ones down while the room is empty is what a person does too, once they have done it a few times.

It does not always succeed, and when it cannot it says so and names which constraint it could not satisfy, rather than producing a plan that quietly breaks one. That distinction matters: a seating plan you believe is valid is worse than no plan, because nobody checks it again.

When it fails, the failure is usually information. Two people who must not be together plus a table count that forces them together is not a puzzle to solve harder; it is a table short, or a constraint somebody needs to be asked about.

Collecting the constraints is the work

Ask for them explicitly and early, because they do not arrive on their own. People will tell you who is coming and will not tell you who must not sit together until they see the plan, at which point everything moves.

Record why alongside each rule where you can. “Not with B” is enough to enforce and not enough to negotiate with; “not with B, they are in dispute over the estate” tells you whether the same table but opposite ends is acceptable, which is frequently the answer that makes the whole plan work.

Separate the hard rules from the preferences. A must-not is a constraint. “Would rather be near the band” is a preference, and mixing the two means the arrangement fails on things that did not matter while something that did gets traded away.

Then print the plan, and print a second copy for whoever is on the door, because the person who built it will not be standing there. Nothing you type is uploaded, which for a list of who has fallen out with whom is worth knowing. Nearby: BADGE prints name badges that can be read across a room, PALLET solves the same kind of packing problem for boxes, and ROSTER is the equivalent for who is working when.