Using some relatively simple math and my programming abilities I intent to write a program which will test the theory that everybody can find their perfect match in the world. Well the whole world thing might be a hair much, thats a lot more complicated because I'm sure countries like China won't be forthcoming with statistics about homosexuality and such. For the initial first release I plan to collect statistics from the US Census on homosexuality, male to female ratio, average age, available versus single, etc. All of those shave off of the potential candidate pool, once the pool is sized down to what it probably really would be then the fun starts.
I figured the easiest way to test the ability to 'find' your ideal mate would be to use a dirt simple equation, such as a the following:
a * b = c
Of course in this you would pick two of the values, A being yourself and C being the end result, then the program picks a random number from the pool of possible mates, tests it against the equation and either returns the correct value and announces that the perfect mate has been found or it recycles and picks a new random number while incrementing a counter. It could find the correct number quickly, however it could also have to cycle through 35 million possible numbers first before landing on the correct number, thats going to be the fun part is testing it and looking at the data it returns.
There are of course a few problems with my design already, one of which being that since I'm relying on the random function of whatever language I choose and not excluding past numbers tried from the pool of candidate numbers that some values could be tested more than once, giving rise to inaccuracies that could become very large depending on just how random things are. I can see some of the rudimentary systems that my brain might concoct will create terrible memory problems as well as a lot of overhead to manage millions of values so I suspect I will either have to recruit outside help or forgo any kind of checks and write off the possible inflation of data to the randomness of the dating game.
During a night of pre-planning with one of the room mates I ventured a guess that for my own given age range there are perhaps 90 million potential mates, give or take a certain percentage for my own miscalculations and assumptions about segments of society, so I suspect that this program could very well take a couple of hours or more to run the first time and of course we can't just do one run, it must be tested thoroughly for bugs, then put through serious tests where we can use the data collected to rant about how futile dating really is.
Labels: project, refute hope
