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)