From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!houxi!ihps3!ihnss!warren
Newsgroups: net.singles
Title: Psychology of computer assisted dating
Article-I.D.: ihnss.164
Posted: Mon Sep 20 13:33:24 1982
Received: Tue Sep 21 07:02:25 1982

Subject:  Psychology of computer assisted dates

(This really belongs somewhere else, but it may be of interest to
the discussion on computer dating going on here, so forgive a rather
lengthy "war story").

A long time ago I went to a college with an enlightened computer use
policy.  They gave everybody an ID, and encouraged everyone to use
the machine by providing lots of nifty games (like simulated
football games or golf courses).  By far the most popular "game" was
something called "date" that was written by one of the student
programmers and was advertized as a compatibility test.  It asked a
lot of nosey questions (primarily of the woman;  this was at that
time a male only school), and used the answers (together with a lot
of calls to the random number function) to derive compatibility
scores and "ratings".  This thing was enormously popular.  People
litteraly lined up for terminals to run it.  Perhaps it was the
novelty of actually being able to touch a computer terminal that
lead people to do this with their dates.

What the crowds didn't know was that the essence of the answers were
being recorded for posterity.  (It didn't keep names and addresses
unless they happened to get attached to comments made about the
program or burried in other answers).  Megabytes of this stuff piled
up, and ultimately got digested into a statistical database.  The
amazing part of this is that the best anyone could tell, the answers
were honest and willingly given.  The data showed obvious consistent
trends that where aplicable checked with other studies about college
students.  This amazed me, since typically the program got run by
people on a first date, with at least the two of you plus
occasionally a lot of friends hovering around the terminal.  Hardly
a situation in which I would think that you would get honest
answers.

My point in publishing this is to indicate how at least at one
point, people seemed to be amazingly open with computers, and to
tell the machine things that you wouldn't think they would tell
each other.  I wonder if this is true of more modern comercial dating
services?  It also points out that data you give to a computer
becomes public domain information.  You can never tell what someone
is going to do with it!

	Still happily married to database entry #937

		Warren Montgomery
		(ihnss!warren)