Random lunch

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Random Lunch , Lunch Roulette or Mystery Lunch is a method that brings randomly selected people from a certain group together for lunch. Often these groups are parts of an organization, a company or people who have come together for a different purpose. The meetings arranged in the random lunch are intended to encourage people who hardly or little know each other to an (informal) exchange. This exchange is seen as conducive to achieving the purpose. It is expected that synergy effects will arise and innovations will be simplified. In companies, Random Lunch can be used under the direction of the HR department. There it falls into the area of employer branding or personnel development .

Math problem

With the random lunch you want to bring together a maximum number of unknown people. As the number of meetings increases, it becomes more difficult to find only groups of people who have not yet met. This is a special case of the maximally diverse grouping problem. For this purpose, a distance function is established between the individual elements - in the case of the random lunch, the time since the last meeting - and an attempt is made to maximize the total. The problem is NP-complete and therefore cannot be solved efficiently.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gallego, M., Laguna, M., Martí, R., and Duarte, a. (2012). Taboo search with strategic oscillation for the maximally diverse grouping problem. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 64 (5): 724-734.