[adamisntdead]

I have been thinking about this sort of thing quite a lot - while I do think it's wrong to split people up on a plane, it is quite an interesting concept.

A similar but less malicious case would be one of organising the seating on a train or in a cinema, but rather then biasing against families, biasing against other, unrelated groups.

For example - in a cinema, you usually do not wish to sit right beside another group when the rest of the seats are free. Still, you don't want to be that far from the center.

How do you design an algorithm for this? How will it scale? How can you make the most number of groups happy with their seats? How do you avoid having individual seats that nobody wants?

[baddox]

Every major cinema I know of in San Francisco allows seats to be reserved on a first come first serve basis. All seats cost the same. It’s extremely simple, and while there might be some negative effect for the cinema whereby people won’t buy tickets for a showing if they see all the good seats are taken, but I strongly suspect that is far overwhelmed by the effect of people going to the cinema more often because they know they won’t have to show up early or worry about getting decent seats.

[brokenmachine]

Cinemas where I am usually don't have allocated seats. Now that you've prompted me to think about it, that fact definitely makes me less likely to go.

Pay money and have a fair chance of getting a seat I'm not happy with? No thanks.

[basilgohar]

While not exactly the answer to your questions, problems of a similar nature ("how to most efficiently use a space for some or multiple purposes") can be solved using Golomb rulers [1]. I first learned about them when I played with the Distributed.net client to calculate optimal Golomb rulers. I feel they or a similar class of tools can be used as the answer to your questions.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler

[amptorn]

> How can you make the most number of groups happy with their seats?

You mean, make the most money? Nobody cares about making customers happy.

[adamisntdead]

Well if you get assigned bad seats you might not come back, for this sort of thing I would say happy customers would lead back into more money

[tivert]

>> You mean, make the most money? Nobody cares about making customers happy.

> Well if you get assigned bad seats you might not come back, for this sort of thing I would say happy customers would lead back into more money

There's a lot of space between making customers so unhappy they never return and making them happy. The smart capitalist will eagerly trade the happiness if his customers for more profit, so long as he doesn't hit a tipping point that destroys his business.

[amptorn]

I heard of a story where Walmart did an experiment in one of their stores where they rearranged all of the displays, made the aisles wider, all sorts of things which made the shopping experience more pleasant and less stressful. Customer feedback was almost unanimously positive; people loved shopping at Walmart now, when previously it had been a hostile and Kafkaesque experience.

But they spent less money.

So Walmart put everything back the way it was.

[brokenmachine]

Just like McDonalds with its seating that is just the right amount of uncomfortable to get the customer out of there ASAP after eating, but not quite that uncomfortable that they wouldn't go there at all.

I feel this goes on a lot in retail as well, eg music in clothing stores. Also Ikea with its mazes and the milk always being at the furthest end of the supermarket.

As someone who is quite sensitive to such uncomfortable situations, I'm at the end of the bell curve that finds the whole experience so unpleasant that I just avoid stores mostly.