In preparing for my wedding this weekend we have spent an egregious amount of time creating just the right table assignments to promote a combination of both friendship and flirting. As we were piecing together table 9 for the reception I began to think if an algorithm would do better at this than my fiance and I. Would a computer and a program do a better job matching up cousins, friends, and fraternity brothers than us? By table 21 I was convinced the answer was maybe.
See in all of the scramble to place people we were unknowingly sourcing dozens of different relationship bonds and connections and making judgment decisions and artificially manipulating the existing networks. We were weighting and valuing the constructs of each relationship individually and making adjustments as we went forward. By table 26 I was confident that there was just way to much metadata to include and consider and articulating it a program would have been a futile attempt. In the end I feel that the human relationship web is best understood in context and not in a database.
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