Mike Macartney's Blog - Posts Tagged "computer-dating"
Flying Babies on the Internet
It is one of those stories you mean to write but never get around to, a love story, circa early 21st century. Maybe the story in Wired Magazine about hacking the OK cupid dating site is one also. Maybe it is Valentine's Day.
In 1957 The Scientific Marriage Foundation started the computer/personality dating matrix off with an IBM punch card sorting scheme. 80-columns of little punched rectangular holes to spell out your path to love and marriage...hanging chads be damned!
Match.com popped into existence at the end of the last century, shortly after AOL attacked the US mail with an endless stream of CDs in colorful envelopes, sleeves, and tin cans offering connection to the Information Superhighway. Back when plesiosaurs, newspapers, and love classifieds ruled the February day. "Attractive tyrannosaur seeks svelte velociraptor for fun and romance, 555-1212" OK cupid is the new kid in the crowded romance personals world catering to the lonely hearts section of the Internet, a place where love is information and you can pick the day's partner over Starbucks with your mobile app.
The Wired magazine story about OKC told of a math professor, Charlie Eppes possibly, writing equations and computer programs to find that good date on OK cupid. Hopefully even a date better than the usual: "Hi, how are you? Eww, I have to take this call..." The programs scraped user data from the profiles on the site while he developed statistics to analyze the responses to the love questions. The charm of the story is how he struggled to have his robot Cyrano mimic a real person typing. Or else, OKC would call out Cypher Agent Smith to hunt Cyrano down and terminate it with extreme prejudice.
The professor actually assumed that the dating site designed its questions to elicit the true love personality of its many members. Hasn't this math guy ever taken any of those online personality tests? I know, for example, that my Harry Potter character is Draco Malfoy. But, I must say that I prefer his father to him. Oh well, that's what the numbers said. If instead OKC hired Hollywood writers to sit around and create entertaining questions it might look sort of like the Ellen show writers table:
"Should we have herself ask Nicolas Cage if he really did come from Krypton in a tiny rocket ship?"
"No, Terry Gross asked him that yesterday."
"Shit!"
"..."
Nah, they probably have a psychologist help them write the questions. Otherwise, it would be like sorting little holes in IBM cards.
It may be a Silicon Valley thing, but I have used dating sites since plesiosaurs at AOL. I have had long relationships, met dear friends, and even business associates from it. I have discovered doctors, psychologists, writers, therapists, engineers, business owners, attorneys, and business executives over the years. About a year ago on Plenty of Fish, I went out for coffee in the sunshine with a woman who turned out to be a call girl. We sat and talked about our grown kids, and how she has to cut off her work nails to do gardening.
Some people haunt bars to meet people, or church, or political events. They seek face-to-face contact to judge compatibility. Some want to talk on the phone right away to find out about the other person. How people write tells much more for me. Having to put down complete thoughts, and not being able to color or correct them with body language or quick restatements disclose much.
That's how it works: the mind, the thoughts, the person. All the canned dating questions and statistical matching say nothing about the mind until the words come out. Getting to the words part is when you can make those love decisions. It is a random, nonlinear process akin to chaos, not a pseudo randomization math problem with some elasticity thrown in to account for nonlinearities, then overlaid on a group of responses to multiple choice questions made up by the psychologist who consults with Ellen. Isn't that what Kurt Vonnegut's story EPICAC is about after all, the electronic love ghost in the machine?
When you are young and new to the game of men and women and life all the human evolutionary adaptation is on your side. Youth+Hormones+Hard Wiring = Love. A psychotic state that lasts eighteen months to two years, or about the time it takes a human offspring to be viable in the cold, cruel world - all Beatles songs aside.
Life past 50 is different. Evolution doesn't select for much past 35 years for humans. At 50 in the modern world we are still functional, life's inertia has become a landslide, and our offspring are just about to jump ship into their own lifeboats. That first love is memory and the marriage that came from it is memory too, likely as not. What questions should the dating site should use to match people then? Want to write the math for it? There is surely a Nobel in that bit of mental prestidigitation.
If love is about dating sites, math, words, and questions, then what about love at first sight? Is that little flying demigod's arrow? The stuff of red candy boxes and mushy heart shaped things in February? Does love happen when the little monster's braodhead slices through your heart while it hovers smirking above you? Is the only true love random love from that metaphorical arrow? Perhaps that is why all those hormones and genes and proteins are setup they way they are, to put you in the right place at the right time for the kill shot from the naked baby with wings?
In early 2013 it seemed that everybody in Silicon Valley was using OKC at the time. My expectations joining it were low, with no thoughts of destiny at all. After selling my house and 34 years in the Valley, my sights were set on a place I always have been called to: Central Asia. Paris calls many, but Kabul has more romance in its little finger than the whole Rive Gauche. My genes must have fallen off a camel or a steppe horse that wandered too far west in some dark past. The sisters of fate can answer that one.
Nothing much happened. My effort was minimal, and I turned OKC off for a while. I tweaked the profile and answered a bucket of questions to broaden out the connections when I returned to it. Yes Virginia, I pick what questions to answer and not answer, and I decide how to answer each to get the right profile. I fell into the "Liberal" bucket as a result. My sex profile did not reside out there at the Palomino club in Las Vegas. My cyber me came out responsible, nonconformist, nontraditional, and not religious, all very true, BTW. Besides, they did not have very good questions for a 50+ engineer who liked shooting since he was 8, talks to call girls about gardening, worked on defense intelligence systems, wrote short contemporary romance and spoken word stories, published books by LGBT authors and retired CIA officers - and wanted to work in Afghanistan or Uzbekistan. They did not ask that, after all.
One night in May 2013 a quick blurb flashed across my homepage. Someone had answered something to the effect: "What is the most embarrassing thing you want to put on your profile?" with, "Do I sound stupid!" It cracked me up! I saw that she lived outside of the Bay Area at a place I had not heard of in Southern California. I wrote back something to the effect: "I just had to write back even if you are down South and say LOL. Thanks for the laugh, I needed it after a bad week." I did not expect a response and went about my life. It is unclear even why it showed up at all, since I never looked for someone outside the Bay Area or put that in any preference on the site.
She wrote back for some reason that the sisters with the thread and scissors alone decided. She never paid attention people outside her local area at all, except for me after that little note.
We never stopped writing, and then Skyping, and then visiting each other. I moved in with Cindy in October and plan to spend the rest of my life with her. It is very much the right thing to do for both of us.
She is a little guilty that she prevented me from moving to Mongolia though. Now, I will never be able to find that stray horseman.
So much for math and dating site questions. Or as Miracle Max said, "Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world - except for a mice MLT - mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe.
In 1957 The Scientific Marriage Foundation started the computer/personality dating matrix off with an IBM punch card sorting scheme. 80-columns of little punched rectangular holes to spell out your path to love and marriage...hanging chads be damned!
Match.com popped into existence at the end of the last century, shortly after AOL attacked the US mail with an endless stream of CDs in colorful envelopes, sleeves, and tin cans offering connection to the Information Superhighway. Back when plesiosaurs, newspapers, and love classifieds ruled the February day. "Attractive tyrannosaur seeks svelte velociraptor for fun and romance, 555-1212" OK cupid is the new kid in the crowded romance personals world catering to the lonely hearts section of the Internet, a place where love is information and you can pick the day's partner over Starbucks with your mobile app.
The Wired magazine story about OKC told of a math professor, Charlie Eppes possibly, writing equations and computer programs to find that good date on OK cupid. Hopefully even a date better than the usual: "Hi, how are you? Eww, I have to take this call..." The programs scraped user data from the profiles on the site while he developed statistics to analyze the responses to the love questions. The charm of the story is how he struggled to have his robot Cyrano mimic a real person typing. Or else, OKC would call out Cypher Agent Smith to hunt Cyrano down and terminate it with extreme prejudice.
The professor actually assumed that the dating site designed its questions to elicit the true love personality of its many members. Hasn't this math guy ever taken any of those online personality tests? I know, for example, that my Harry Potter character is Draco Malfoy. But, I must say that I prefer his father to him. Oh well, that's what the numbers said. If instead OKC hired Hollywood writers to sit around and create entertaining questions it might look sort of like the Ellen show writers table:
"Should we have herself ask Nicolas Cage if he really did come from Krypton in a tiny rocket ship?"
"No, Terry Gross asked him that yesterday."
"Shit!"
"..."
Nah, they probably have a psychologist help them write the questions. Otherwise, it would be like sorting little holes in IBM cards.
It may be a Silicon Valley thing, but I have used dating sites since plesiosaurs at AOL. I have had long relationships, met dear friends, and even business associates from it. I have discovered doctors, psychologists, writers, therapists, engineers, business owners, attorneys, and business executives over the years. About a year ago on Plenty of Fish, I went out for coffee in the sunshine with a woman who turned out to be a call girl. We sat and talked about our grown kids, and how she has to cut off her work nails to do gardening.
Some people haunt bars to meet people, or church, or political events. They seek face-to-face contact to judge compatibility. Some want to talk on the phone right away to find out about the other person. How people write tells much more for me. Having to put down complete thoughts, and not being able to color or correct them with body language or quick restatements disclose much.
That's how it works: the mind, the thoughts, the person. All the canned dating questions and statistical matching say nothing about the mind until the words come out. Getting to the words part is when you can make those love decisions. It is a random, nonlinear process akin to chaos, not a pseudo randomization math problem with some elasticity thrown in to account for nonlinearities, then overlaid on a group of responses to multiple choice questions made up by the psychologist who consults with Ellen. Isn't that what Kurt Vonnegut's story EPICAC is about after all, the electronic love ghost in the machine?
When you are young and new to the game of men and women and life all the human evolutionary adaptation is on your side. Youth+Hormones+Hard Wiring = Love. A psychotic state that lasts eighteen months to two years, or about the time it takes a human offspring to be viable in the cold, cruel world - all Beatles songs aside.
Life past 50 is different. Evolution doesn't select for much past 35 years for humans. At 50 in the modern world we are still functional, life's inertia has become a landslide, and our offspring are just about to jump ship into their own lifeboats. That first love is memory and the marriage that came from it is memory too, likely as not. What questions should the dating site should use to match people then? Want to write the math for it? There is surely a Nobel in that bit of mental prestidigitation.
If love is about dating sites, math, words, and questions, then what about love at first sight? Is that little flying demigod's arrow? The stuff of red candy boxes and mushy heart shaped things in February? Does love happen when the little monster's braodhead slices through your heart while it hovers smirking above you? Is the only true love random love from that metaphorical arrow? Perhaps that is why all those hormones and genes and proteins are setup they way they are, to put you in the right place at the right time for the kill shot from the naked baby with wings?
In early 2013 it seemed that everybody in Silicon Valley was using OKC at the time. My expectations joining it were low, with no thoughts of destiny at all. After selling my house and 34 years in the Valley, my sights were set on a place I always have been called to: Central Asia. Paris calls many, but Kabul has more romance in its little finger than the whole Rive Gauche. My genes must have fallen off a camel or a steppe horse that wandered too far west in some dark past. The sisters of fate can answer that one.
Nothing much happened. My effort was minimal, and I turned OKC off for a while. I tweaked the profile and answered a bucket of questions to broaden out the connections when I returned to it. Yes Virginia, I pick what questions to answer and not answer, and I decide how to answer each to get the right profile. I fell into the "Liberal" bucket as a result. My sex profile did not reside out there at the Palomino club in Las Vegas. My cyber me came out responsible, nonconformist, nontraditional, and not religious, all very true, BTW. Besides, they did not have very good questions for a 50+ engineer who liked shooting since he was 8, talks to call girls about gardening, worked on defense intelligence systems, wrote short contemporary romance and spoken word stories, published books by LGBT authors and retired CIA officers - and wanted to work in Afghanistan or Uzbekistan. They did not ask that, after all.
One night in May 2013 a quick blurb flashed across my homepage. Someone had answered something to the effect: "What is the most embarrassing thing you want to put on your profile?" with, "Do I sound stupid!" It cracked me up! I saw that she lived outside of the Bay Area at a place I had not heard of in Southern California. I wrote back something to the effect: "I just had to write back even if you are down South and say LOL. Thanks for the laugh, I needed it after a bad week." I did not expect a response and went about my life. It is unclear even why it showed up at all, since I never looked for someone outside the Bay Area or put that in any preference on the site.
She wrote back for some reason that the sisters with the thread and scissors alone decided. She never paid attention people outside her local area at all, except for me after that little note.
We never stopped writing, and then Skyping, and then visiting each other. I moved in with Cindy in October and plan to spend the rest of my life with her. It is very much the right thing to do for both of us.
She is a little guilty that she prevented me from moving to Mongolia though. Now, I will never be able to find that stray horseman.
So much for math and dating site questions. Or as Miracle Max said, "Sonny, true love is the greatest thing in the world - except for a mice MLT - mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe.
