Comments on: Does love compute?

Does love compute?

Chrysostom — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 07:38:47 -0800

In 1966, I started one of the world's first computer dating services. One problem: I had no computer.

By: Colonel Panic

Colonel Panic — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 07:51:28 -0800

if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it does it make any noise?

By: three blind mice

three blind mice — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 07:54:08 -0800

if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it does it make any noise? You have to ask the questions in the form of a true or false statement or the computer will never find your true love.

By: iamkimiam

iamkimiam — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:07:58 -0800

That's how my parents met, punch cards and all. Still together to this day and I don't think there's anybody else out there in the world for either of them (to put it most diplomatically). (I suppose that makes me just as weird by proxy (progeny?) but I'll accept that.)

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:11:39 -0800

Why would computers want to date each other?

By: jonmc

jonmc — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:12:11 -0800

I have an ex-girlfriend who's parents met the same way.

By: oceanjesse

oceanjesse — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:13:54 -0800

So your parents met on retro Okcupid, that's cool. Mine met each other through VHS video dating and it didn't go so well. (no really, they did)

By: symbioid

symbioid — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:21:31 -0800

My dad winked at my mom on a bus while he was stationed in Oregon while on leave for the Navy. And from there almost 18 years later, I was born. I still live with my ex who I started dating after finding on Friend Finder. We get along well enough, so it worked, somehow. OKCupid, I'm having much worse results. Thank god for internet porn, at least. *sigh*

By: vorpal bunny

vorpal bunny — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:57:59 -0800

In 1966, I started one of the world's first computer dating services. One problem: I had no computer. This sounds like a the beginning of a short story that is a thinly veiled account of my sorry relationship track record before I met my wife.

By: vorpal bunny

vorpal bunny — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 09:00:30 -0800

My dad met my mom by a bread warmer in Elvis Presley's favorite hotel in Denver. See, technology has alway brought people together! (The hotel eventually became an infamous, massive crack den. A fact my dad was unaware of when he took me there to show me the momentous spot.)

By: EmpressCallipygos

EmpressCallipygos — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 09:05:21 -0800

Two of my exes are two of my best friends today. One I met on match.com, and the other I met via the print personal ads in the back of the erstwhile New York Press. I also just started sorta-kinda-casually seeing someone I met via OKCupid, although that came after a SHIT-TON of bad OKC luck - but I'm chalking that more up to "the past five years just sucked overall" than "OKCupid is at fault".

By: KGMoney

KGMoney — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 09:18:23 -0800

This was probably a lot more common than Mr. Sutton thinks it was. My dad wrote a similar program for a university fund-raiser at about the same time.

By: KGMoney

KGMoney — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 09:24:07 -0800

Haha, I'd only read the first couple of paragraphs. I should have said that my dad _actually_ wrote something like this, although he did tell me that he got a little lazy with the matching algorithm and made several of the questions automatic disqualifiers, which I guess is kind of similar...

By: crazy with stars

crazy with stars — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 09:38:17 -0800

I greatly enjoyed this story. Thanks for sharing it.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 10:13:37 -0800

That's an adorable story. It reminds me of Matchmaker, a 1980s-era BBS from Texas that provided online computer dating. I used it briefly in, oh, 1989, and that might even be how I met my first ever boyfriend. Matchmaker made a serious go of it in the Internet era and eventually sold to Lycos for $45M in 2000, then slowly crumbled.

By: prize bull octorok

prize bull octorok — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 12:32:18 -0800

CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No computer? No computer!

By: codswallop

codswallop — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 18:23:31 -0800

Came here for a clever application of McBee cards, leaving disappointed. t reminds me of Matchmaker, a 1980s-era BBS from Texas that provided online computer dating. I used it briefly in, oh, 1989, and that might even be how I met my first ever boyfriend. Matchmaker made a serious go of it in the Internet era and eventually sold to Lycos for $45M in 2000, then slowly crumbled. Met my wife there in 1999 :) CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No computer? No computer! Still trying to wrap my mind around Act II.

By: flug

flug — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 21:04:06 -0800

Instead, we . . . took the cards belonging to men and those belonging to women, shuffled them all up together, and made our matches by chance. I had just discovered Camus and was big on the randomness of life. Really, this is how ALL computer dating systems should work. Ask them all sorts of detailed questions to give them the impression that you are truly gazing into the depth of their souls and matching them up with their soul-mates. Then just randomly shuffle them up see what happens. It would be really interesting to see a comparison of the success rate of this method vs the supposedly super-sophisticated systems we have nowadays . . .

By: Ruthless Bunny

Ruthless Bunny — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:46:07 -0800

As a grad student at UC Berkeley, during the sixties, my dad developed an assessment that used computer punch-cards as an evaluation tool as his MSW Project/Thesis. I remember him bringing home a thousand punch cards, all carefully notched, and he'd use a brass rod to thread through the holes in the notches and somehow...I'm not sure how it worked, but Jesus help you if your sticky paws went near the box of cards! Later on, after presenting his system at a conference, he was approached to work with Timothy Leary on something similar, and they met a few times. Leary may have used the idea to produce Mind Mirror, or it may have been something he just wanted to bounce off my Dad. Either way, apparently Leary had a giant pencil sculpture in his living room. So eventually it went from cards to one of those giant floppy disks that were so popular in the early eighties. I remember sitting at the dining room table in my parent's house spending fucking HOURS on that damn thing! OMG, how freaking frustrating. So yeah, punch cards. No thank you.