On OK Cupid
The past couple of months, I have been exploring a web-site I stumbled across called OK Cupid. It is sort of a dating website, but its most fascinating aspect is its seemingly incredibly complex matching algorithms. Its accuracy is pretty damn uncanny.
Basically, you answer a set of questions (there are 1400+), and based on your answers (and based on what you would like your "ideal match" to answer, the web-site builds up a personality profile, which it then matches against all the other profiles out there. The greatest thing is that you can weigh your own questions, so you can answer a question, and then select its importance. If you want religion to weigh heavily, for example, you can select "mandatory", and the question becomes 250 times more important than a question flagged "a little important".
I've had so much fun with the matching algorithm and its quirks that I haven't actually contacted many people on the site (although a few did message me), but overall, the site is a fantastic sociological experiment, in that it allows people to select what they want in a partner.
Interestingly enough, the search engine tends to match me with people who have answered all - or most of - the questions. I wonder if that is because it means that it has an accurate picture of me (I have answered 98% or so of the questions - the rest I skipped because they were too annoying or US-centric or irrelevant), or because people who tend to answer all the questions tend to have an obsessive personality (like myself), and that the matching algorithm somehow has decided that I match well with people who are also obsessive.
Another interesting note is that I seem to match well with people living in Norway, continental europe, and the east and west coast of the US. I match extremely badly with people from the north-west of England (a bummer, considering I live here, but not really an issue, because I appear to have found a relatively good match manually).
If you have too much time on your hands, if you are generally obsessive, or if you find matching, sociology, anthropology or internet dating interesting, you can do a lot worse than checking out OKC. For extra geeky goodness, the whole thing is free (as in beer), and it actually runs on a web server that is written from scratch, in order to manage to cater to the demands of the OKC website. Most geeky. Most fascinating. Most recommended.
It also has a separate, 6-degrees-of-separation-style matching thing for friend networks, which I would like to test. If you are generally interested anyway, why not sign up, go trough the motions, and add me to your friends network?
About the OKC verdict
According to OKC, I am more independent, less old-fashioned, more literary, more political, more adventurous, less pure and more selfish than the average person who got tested.
Independent, literary, political and adventurous I can live with without any problems - they are all Truths. "Less old-fashioned" I'm not sure what means. I presume "less old-fashioned" means more new-fashioned, or "modern". Which still makes little sense. I guess it could be seen as being synonymous with "progressive". Which would make sense, I guess.
Less pure and more selfish? I guess those are Truths as well, although being called a selfish slut after having completed the most in-depth personality test I've ever done is a bit of a kick in the groin. Having said that, it is probably true. Although I do tend to care about other people, when it comes down to it, I'd probably put myself ahead of other people - with honourable exceptions, but those are beyond the scope of this LJ post. Also, I'm not entirely sure what "pure" means. I guess it means something along the lines of morality or something, although I have a vague idea that my anti-authoritarian views, coupled with strong socialist ideals, and a presumably more colourful set of opinions on sexuality, politics and general morality (especially when it comes to the questions with a religious - especially christian - bias) have probably escewed the results a bit.
Or perhaps I'm just a selfish slut in denial.
Link: http://www.okcupid.com
Link to my profile directly: http://kamps.org/g/?xtag | 
