You have 100 people coming to a conference. There are 11 sessions. Tables seat 10 people each. How can you set up a seating chart for the 11 sessions so everyone has a chance to meet everyone else at least once?
Bill tries brute-force Monte Carlo and can't get better than 65% of the way to the goal.
Is there a better way?
Download my workbook from here: Arrange100People.xlsm
Bill tries brute-force Monte Carlo and can't get better than 65% of the way to the goal.
Is there a better way?
Download my workbook from here: Arrange100People.xlsm
Transcript of the video:
Hey, here's a Saturday challenge for you.
This is episode 2438: how to have 100 people meet each other at a conference. Learn Excel from MrExcel Podcast.
I am Bill Jelen. Today, a question sent in by a friend of mine. He has a conference - 100 people coming to a conference and he wants everyone to meet everyone else. There's 11 sessions, 10 people per table.
How does he set up a seating chart for each session so everyone meets everyone one time?
I don't think it can be done, but this is the power of groupthink.
Someone out there, has a better solution than what I have, right?
So what I have done. I have the 10 tables here, the 11 sessions going across.
And for each one I've randomly assigned the hundred people using SEQUENCE of 100.
And then sort by RANDARRAY of 100. So you see, it just randomly assigns people.
And then over here I have a matrix that checks to see person one met person two. Did person three meet person four.
And I have some VBA that will fill that in.
Ideally, we have 9900 meetings (because you can't meet yourself) and in this particular case I've gotten to about 62% of that.
And if I come down here there's two people that have been at the same table five times.
I hope they don't hate each other!
And there's a little frequency distribution down here to see the quality. There were 3700 people that never met.
3676 people that met once. 854 that met twice and so on, right?
And once I had this macro that would do it once, then I had it run for 1000 times.
It took about 30 minutes or so.
Actually, I don't know because I went away and started doing other things and I came back and it was done.
And the best quality I could get was 6588.
I had the macro save it back here and there's the frequency distribution for the best. But this is far from the goal.
The goal is to have everyone meet everyone else once.
I went out to Google and I looked there must be software that does this already you would think.
But I can't find anything right? So here's the question for you.
How would you attack this problem in Excel?
I'll take this workbook and save it out to one drive. I'll put a link down in the YouTube description.
Let me know where you come up with.
This is episode 2438: how to have 100 people meet each other at a conference. Learn Excel from MrExcel Podcast.
I am Bill Jelen. Today, a question sent in by a friend of mine. He has a conference - 100 people coming to a conference and he wants everyone to meet everyone else. There's 11 sessions, 10 people per table.
How does he set up a seating chart for each session so everyone meets everyone one time?
I don't think it can be done, but this is the power of groupthink.
Someone out there, has a better solution than what I have, right?
So what I have done. I have the 10 tables here, the 11 sessions going across.
And for each one I've randomly assigned the hundred people using SEQUENCE of 100.
And then sort by RANDARRAY of 100. So you see, it just randomly assigns people.
And then over here I have a matrix that checks to see person one met person two. Did person three meet person four.
And I have some VBA that will fill that in.
Ideally, we have 9900 meetings (because you can't meet yourself) and in this particular case I've gotten to about 62% of that.
And if I come down here there's two people that have been at the same table five times.
I hope they don't hate each other!
And there's a little frequency distribution down here to see the quality. There were 3700 people that never met.
3676 people that met once. 854 that met twice and so on, right?
And once I had this macro that would do it once, then I had it run for 1000 times.
It took about 30 minutes or so.
Actually, I don't know because I went away and started doing other things and I came back and it was done.
And the best quality I could get was 6588.
I had the macro save it back here and there's the frequency distribution for the best. But this is far from the goal.
The goal is to have everyone meet everyone else once.
I went out to Google and I looked there must be software that does this already you would think.
But I can't find anything right? So here's the question for you.
How would you attack this problem in Excel?
I'll take this workbook and save it out to one drive. I'll put a link down in the YouTube description.
Let me know where you come up with.
