High Frequency Dating

November 21, 2013 3:11 AM

Automate your love life.

Facial attractiveness is surprisingly uncomplicated to quantify. Essentially, evolution has us seeking partners that are as “normal” as possible. Anything that is unusually big or small, any ratio that differs from \phi, or about 1.618, hurts the score. After the face(s) are identified in the image, a mask of 25 anthropometric proportion indices is overlaid and mean compliance is measured.

Coming soon to a github repository near you.

posted by kandinski (28 comments total)

No wonder then that my neighbors, the Fibonacci's seem so attracted to each other..
posted by vapidave at 3:23 AM on November 21, 2013 [5 favorites]

Hi. Totally frightening. This actually happened. I read it. You, Metafilter, are all my witnesses. Need soft bear now. Must go find soft bear. Soft, soft bear from childhood.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 3:39 AM on November 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

So packet sniffing and handy use of a minimal python to get the right speed are the way forward then?

How very modern.
posted by MuffinMan at 4:17 AM on November 21, 2013

Excellent use of the "betterthanpua" tag.
posted by fight or flight at 4:20 AM on November 21, 2013

Anything that is unusually big or small, any ratio that differs from \phi, or about 1.618, hurts the score.

The average face is judged perfect by the average person, and the average person is an abstraction. People who like big noses are balanced out by people who like small noses, so the mean is something in the middle. You are not the average person --- no person is the average person. But that is what these facial attractiveness measures are measuring: attractiveness to the average person. It's dumb to ignore your own preferences and seek the mean instead.
posted by painquale at 4:46 AM on November 21, 2013 [19 favorites]

set applause on -stunned -agape

If things are going poorly the emergency “tell me about your cat” routine is run and the microphone is muted to prevent the Speech to Text processor from running useless cycles.

>How about a nice game of chess?_
posted by petebest at 5:03 AM on November 21, 2013

Excellent use of the "betterthanpua" tag.

Took me a second to figure out what "thanpua" is.
posted by griphus at 5:11 AM on November 21, 2013

Sending your date an ecard/receipt afterwards is pure genius.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:13 AM on November 21, 2013

So packet sniffing and handy use of a minimal python to get the right speed are the way forward then?

Look, if you're into packet sniffing -- and I'm not judging here -- you might want to keep it on the QT until you have made a close connection. Not everyone is as open minded as the average MeFite. You notice that large and small values are disadvantaged, so, I am afraid, if your python is minimal, you may have some problems. Fortunately, I have heard of this one surprising trick that can make even a minimal python handy, so....
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:18 AM on November 21, 2013

This is just outragefilter, right?
posted by OmieWise at 5:33 AM on November 21, 2013

OmieWise, not at all. Maybe a poorly crafted FPP. But there is a good payoff if you keep reading the article.
posted by kandinski at 5:38 AM on November 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is glorious (and a lovely RTFA filter I'll add).
posted by Skorgu at 5:51 AM on November 21, 2013 [3 favorites]

Yeah, the beauty of it is that the buzzwords are all real and technically do what he claims.
posted by vogon_poet at 6:15 AM on November 21, 2013

Unfortunately, the complex mathematical operations required by FABIO typically exhaust the Double’s battery in around 01:57-02:03 minutes, depending on the female.

Depending on the female. I bet that's what they all say.
posted by three blind mice at 6:19 AM on November 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

I thought this was real till pretty far in.
posted by grobstein at 6:45 AM on November 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Darling, do you like Turing?"

"I don't know you naughty boy! I've never Tured!"
posted by chavenet at 6:48 AM on November 21, 2013 [7 favorites]

GenjiandProust: "Not everyone is as open minded as the average MeFite."


I think you meant "Not everyone is as promiscuous as the mode MeFite."

yeah, I know, punny tcpdump log message humor, but any port in a packet storm, I always say.
posted by namewithoutwords at 7:35 AM on November 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

Damn up until the sending the robot on the date part it all sounded pretty plausible.
posted by Joe Chip at 7:38 AM on November 21, 2013

Phi as a ratio is overused. I don't think there's much reason to think in some of these contexts that anything other than 'somewhere between 1.5 and 2 is probably about right' is true. Certainly not three decimal places of the ratio anyway.
posted by edd at 8:02 AM on November 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

ahahahaha he has a broad familiarity with modern machine learning!
posted by zscore at 8:14 AM on November 21, 2013

I'm reminded of this passage, by Mefi's own Charlie Stross, in Accelerando:

"Nnngk." Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. "I, ah, that is to say" – At which moment, his partials re-integrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. It's a trap! they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes – clean-shaven, he can't help noticing – thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon, Mother's trying to make you loose like her! and he remembers what it would be like to wake up in bed next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research ideas, even if she's a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. "What is this?" he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting.

posted by adamrice at 8:44 AM on November 21, 2013

It all starts to go awry when the Double Robot ends up on a date with another Double Robot. Shortly thereafter he receives a message from the algorithm that starts off with " It's not you...".

Some time later he is visited by both the algorithms, that want him to program a child algorithm for them. It all ends up on an ice floe in the Arctic.
posted by happyroach at 10:18 AM on November 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

"It's dumb to ignore your own preferences and seek the mean instead."

Perhaps finish the article?
posted by klangklangston at 11:47 AM on November 21, 2013

This is just outragefilter, right?

I wonder how many flags it got.
posted by Sebmojo at 11:54 AM on November 21, 2013

I think the most beautiful thing I can imagine is two instances of this procedure dating each other.
posted by aparrish at 1:07 PM on November 21, 2013

It all starts to go awry when the Double Robot ends up on a date with another Double Robot.

I think Sheckley wrote that one...
posted by Zed at 5:28 PM on November 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

The whole idea that "attractiveness" identifies some kind of genetic or evolutionary advantage is anti-Darwin and anti-science.

The individuals of all currently surviving species are equivalent in terms of evolutionary adaptiveness and fitness. Extinctions and extinction events are what determine which species and individuals number among the "fittest", and lack of evolutionary fitness cannot apply to presently living organisms.

I really hate it when people try to justify their attractions as some kind of evolutionary advantage.
It's not.
posted by mistersquid at 6:18 PM on November 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

I like the idea of a "Double Robot" which would act as an autonomous agent to date on my behalf and which will check "whether or not another double of me [already] has a date [at the same place] at the time (awkward)".

I mean, I already have this belated-article-reading autonomous agent making premature MetaFilter comments for me. What could go wrong?
posted by mistersquid at 6:27 PM on November 21, 2013