---
title: About Venue Seating Wizard
description: What Venue Seating Wizard is, who builds it, how the seating optimizer works, and what it deliberately does not do.
canonical: https://venue-seating-wizard.aviramk.com/about/
last-updated: 2026-08-23
---

# About Venue Seating Wizard

Venue Seating Wizard is a free tool that turns a guest list, a set of tables and a pile of social constraints into a seating arrangement. It was built for one wedding and now handles any venue.

## Why it exists

Seating an event by hand is a constraint satisfaction problem that people solve with sticky notes. Families have to stay together, some guests must not share a table, a few have already been promised a seat next to the dance floor, and every table holds a fixed number of chairs. Change one decision and the rest shift. Venue Seating Wizard states that problem explicitly and lets a solver do the rearranging.

## How the optimizer works

The solver replaced an earlier Python service built on OR-Tools CP-SAT, and reproduces that model's objective coefficient for coefficient. It scores an arrangement on three terms: group cohesion, weighted by each group's cohesion strength and the square root of its size; unmet seating preferences, weighted by the normalized distance between tables or from a table to an area rectangle; and the number of tables used. Rather than proving optimality, it constructs a good arrangement greedily and improves it with simulated annealing over relocate, swap, ejection-chain and group-move neighbourhoods, evaluating each candidate move incrementally. Only arrangements that respect every table capacity are ever reported.

## Architecture

The whole application is a static site. There is no backend, no account, and no per-solve cost. Optimization happens in a Web Worker in your own browser, which is why it works offline once loaded and why cancelling a run is instant. Guest lists are parsed, solved and exported locally; nothing about your event is transmitted anywhere. The interface is available in English and in Hebrew with full right-to-left support.

## What it does not do

- It does not store your data, sync between devices, or offer collaborative editing.
- It does not print place cards or table numbers; export the CSV and use your own stationery workflow.
- It does not prove optimality — it finds good arrangements fast, and better ones the longer it runs.

## Who builds it

Venue Seating Wizard is built and maintained by [Aviram Kofman](https://aviramk.com), an AI engineer. The source is public at [github.com/doodledood/seats-app](https://github.com/doodledood/seats-app).