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Five diners · Six cuisines · A rule with a name · Unofficial fan tribute

The Takeout Night Optimiser

Five people, one order, no two compatible preferences. Averaging is how you get an evening where four people are fine and one person eats bread — so this ranks every option by the person who does worst out of it, shows the arithmetic, and tells you plainly when there is no good answer.

Laying out the menus…

How it works, and the rule it uses

Five diners, six cuisines, and a score from nought to five for every pairing. Toggle who is eating tonight and the page scores every option twice: the total, which is the answer averaging would give, and the minimum — how the worst-off person at the table does. It ranks on the minimum, and only breaks ties on the total.

That rule has a name and a long argument behind it. Maximising the minimum is the Rawlsian choice: judge an arrangement by how it treats whoever it treats worst. It is one line of code and it produces visibly different answers from the average, which is exactly why the whole table is on screen rather than just the winner — you can see the column with the biggest total losing, and see why.

It admits when there is no good answer

Some tables have no order that leaves everybody content, and a tool that always produces a confident recommendation is a tool nobody should trust with the second one. When the best available minimum is still below the grumble line, the page says so and names the person who is going to have a bad night. That is the table you picked, not a failure of the arithmetic.

The diners are original, and named for how they eat

The Purist, The Allergy, The Adventurer, The Economist and The Diplomat. None of them is anybody — putting preferences in a real character’s mouth is the line this corner does not cross, and it would make the tool useless for the household actually using it. They are five recognisable ways of being difficult about dinner, and the scores are hand-set rather than generated, because a random matrix produces a cuisine that is good for everybody about a third of the time and a dominant column makes the whole thing pointless.

Settle it in the forum

The board’s forum has opinions about the rule itself, which is the good argument. Post tonight’s table and defend the average if you dare.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan page for the television series The Big Bang Theory, naming the show under nominative fair use. It is a free, unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Warner Bros. Television, Chuck Lorre Productions, or CBS.

Every word on this page is original writing. No dialogue, catchphrase, script text, scene, still, logo or artwork from any television series is reproduced anywhere in it, and nothing here imitates an official mark. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of The Big Bang Theory. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

The rest of the corner

The Big Bang Theory wing also has The Whiteboard Test, and more is on its roadmap. The fan tributes hub has the Westeros, Supernatural, King of the Hill, Fringe and Last Kingdom wings alongside this one, and the free tools that are not about anybody’s fiction. If you would rather play something with more to it, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.

Comments

Iron Realms is an original work of fantasy strategy. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any other game or franchise, and “Iron Realms” is a working project name rather than necessarily the final title. Its lore, names and artwork are original or used under CC0/CC-BY/OFL licences (see the in-game Credits). The community section also hosts unofficial fan tributes — quizzes and diversions made for fun, not part of the game — which name other fictional worlds under their own labels and are likewise not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to their rights holders. Pre-alpha, built in public. Nothing is for sale. No payment is accepted, and any price named here describes the intended model only. This is an early build — features, balance and prices are conceptual and may change or disappear between visits, and progress may be reset. Treat anything here as work in progress rather than a promise. Every page here is recorded: a first-party cookie, your IP address, your device and where you came from, and — when you are signed in — your account, are logged for site analytics; see what we record and why.