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In this paper we study a variant of the Malicious Maître d' problem. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike in Peter Winkler's book Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection, involves seating diners around a circular table with napkins placed between each pair of adjacent settings. The goal of the maître d' is to seat the diners in a way that maximizes the number of diners who arrive at the table to find the napkins on both the left and right of their place already taken by their neighbors. Previous work described a seating algorithm in which the maître d' expects to force about 18\% of the diners to be napkinless. In this paper, we show that if the maître d' learns each diner's preference for the right or left napkin before they are placed at the table, this expectation jumps to nearly $1/3$ (and converges to $1/3$ as the table size gets large). Moreover, our strategy is optimal for every sequence of diners' preferences. 

We study the connection between triangulations of a type $$A$$ root polytope and the resonance arrangement, a hyperplane arrangement that shows up in a surprising number of contexts. Despite an elementary definition for the resonance arrangement, the number of resonance chambers has only been computed up to the $n=8$ dimensional case. We focus on data structures for labeling chambers, such as sign vectors and sets of alternating trees, with an aim at better understanding the structure of the resonance arrangement, and, in particular, enumerating its chambers. Along the way, we make connections with similar (and similarly difficult) enumeration questions. With the root polytope viewpoint, we relate resonance chambers to the chambers of polynomiality of the Kostant partition function. With the hyperplane viewpoint, we clarify the connections between resonance chambers and threshold functions. In particular, we show that the base-2 logarithm of the number of resonance chambers is asymptotically $n^2$.