Go on, try it

We get to choose the numbers, so let's choose them by hand and put every word next to its true relatives.

And let's not be fussy about it. "Close" doesn't mean glued together. A word only has to land nearer its relatives than its strangers. "Cat" can sit a few doors down from "wolf" and that's fine, as long as both are a long way from "vegetable." We have plenty of slack.

So here are four words: king, queen, man, woman. How would you sort them? Go on, shuffle them around.

Watch what you are up against as you do. king belongs beside queen, because both are royal. man belongs beside woman, because both are ordinary. But king also belongs beside man, because both are male, and queen beside woman, because both are female.

Every one of the four has to end up close to two others. A dot fills in for each of those four bonds you manage to keep.

See how far you get.