Hi,

I'm a teacher and was wondering how easy/difficult it would be to create a program that generates random seating chart variations when given a few constraints (or if something like this exists already).

For example, if I have 25 students and want to generate a seating chart with the following situation/constraints:

-There are two groups of 4 seats (in a square facing each other), and two groups of 5 seats (square + 1 on the end)

-There are 6 solo seats

-In the group seats, boys and girls cannot sit directly next to each other (they can sit across from each other though)

-There are 7 students who must either be in a solo seat, or in a seat that is not in the same group as (insert names).

-There are 3 pairs of students who can sit either in groups or solo seats, but cannot be in the same groups as the other person in their pair.

Thoughts?

Not complicated at all with only a few constraints like your example above - someone could throw together a crude implementation/simple UI of that specific scenario in an hour. Building something more flexible to let you programmatically generate various scenarios with varying inputs would take longer and the more constraints, the more complex it gets unsurprisingly. At the absolute upper end of the complexity spectrum, Abl Schools is tackling the Master Schedule.

Do you have 25 or 24 students to place? (4 * 2 + 5 * 2 + 6 = 24)

You should try implenting it yourself. The best way to learn programming is by having a personal real world problem you need to solve.

This looks similar to the Map Coloring problem, so you could write an algorithm for that then compare/study it against existing efficient algorithms.

And maybe in version 2 you could generalize it a bit, e.g. trying to maximize diversity in each group with respect gender, ethnicity, height, GPA, friend groups etc.

Give it a shot and let us know if you need help.

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Have you tried any of these: https://www.google.ee/search?q=rando...hrome&ie=UTF-8?