Why I Don't Have A Girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/phd_students/backus/girlfriend/why_i_dont_have_a_girlfriend.pdf

by MarlonPro • 13 years ago

10 7 13 years ago

www2.warwick.ac.uk

dvt• 13 years ago

Simultaneously brilliant and hilarious :)

gamegoblin• 13 years ago

1 in 20? Someone has extremely high standards.

That being said, this was interesting, as recently I have taken in interest in applying computer science to dating.

I recently wrote a program that takes a list of attributes (attractiveness, intelligence, etc), then, tournament-style, matches them against each other and lets the user pick which is more important. After enough time, it has a decent idea of the relative importance of each attribute (without necessarily pairing them all, which would require N(N-1)/2 pairings, far too many for a decent sized attribute list).

Then it takes as input a list of people (in my case, a list of girls that I know). It then asks questions such as "Who is more [attribute], [person1] or [person2]?".

After asking a sufficient number of questions, it can produce a weighted average with which to rank people.

I then treat this list as a heuristic in my metaphorical graph-search algorithm for a girlfriend.

I could post the code if anyone is interested.

jamesjporter• 13 years ago

Yes please, very interested!

dalke• 13 years ago

Didn't this come out a few years ago? ... Ahh, here's the HN thread about it from 2010 years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052158 .

adamio• 13 years ago

All this does is help challenge the validity of the Drake Equation

rsamvit• 13 years ago

1 in 20 is a pretty high standard

fbe• 13 years ago

http://xkcd.com/314/

Why I Don't Have A Girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation

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