The Pudding Taster and the Neural Network

A review of paiq.nl

Yours truly, the taster of Cupid's digital puddings, has received an invitation to Paiq.nl - a dating site that uses a neural network to match people.

Using software to match people to each other is hardly a new concept. Nor is it new that you can only contact the people that the computer matched you to; the Pudding Taster believes that eHarmony has worked that way since it started.
Where Paiq differs from other dating services is that it uses a neural network. It is an adaptive matchmaking process, that relies on the feedback of users and tries to automatically incorporate it. In other words, the system learns from it's success or failure - or so the authors say.

How does Brain Pudding taste?
If Paiq were a pudding.... then a bite of Paiq's pudding would seem to have flavor initially, but loose it's taste before being swallowed. Also, the waiter keeps begging for tips, hinting that he might have something better for you.

And now in English:

"A bite has flavor initially"
It's easy to get in touch with people, which is a great advantage over the "profile gallery" dating sites. Instead of being presented with a list of people, just a few matches are presented. If they're online, you can chat with these pre-selected ladies right away. And if nobody is present, you can ask the system to find someone who is. It looks for the highest matching person online, and will invite her to chat with you. Failing that, it simply tries the next best match, and so on. This is the good, flavoured part.

"The bite looses flavor before being swallowed": 
The bad part is that you can't see someone's pictures until you've chatted for 15 minutes. There is a certain fairness about this, in that it means you can't judge a person by their looks alone. But when yours truly finally saw the pictures, they really didn't match his taste.

"The waiter keeps begging for tips":
Paiq is free, in the sense that you don't need to pay to talk to someone. But you have to pay for extra services.
Paiq matched me with 2 people initially, and matches me with a new person after several days.
But it will match you any time if you're willing to pay. This is called the TimeCheat. It won't show the pictures of other people until you've chatted with them - but it will show you if you're willing to pay. This is called the PhotoCheat. 

And furthermore....
The Pudding Taster is not impressed with the "personality test". It seemed rather superficial, and like most of these tests, it assumes that the participant knows himself/herself well.
And then there is the neural network. It is supposed to learn from the feedback going back into the system, but that feedback seems to be limited to whether or not you stay in touch with someone. The Pudding Taster wonders how the system is supposed to learn from such extremely limited information.

Pudding Judgement: 6 out of 10.
So far, it's a disappointment; better than profile galleries in that you have immediate contact, but that pretty much sums it up. And even that immediate contact comes from the "SpeedDate" system, not from the neural network!
Still, there is potential for this one. There are still several options that the Pudding Taster has not yet tried, so he is not giving up hope yet.

Cupid's Pudding

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating".

Four years ago, several people told me I should try online dating. Two of them were female friends; another was an acquaintance who had 2 female friends who had found love online.
In retrospect, I should have noticed that these were all women. But at the time, I figured that meant online dating was finally attracting women as well as men.

Never one to do things half-hearted, I tried two paid services and two free ones. I lost count of the number of women I contacted, but it was a lot.

Result: 4 reactions.

One woman wrote back once, I wrote her back and never heard from her since.
Two women hit the "Sorry, not interested" button.
The last one wrote back to tell me that yes, we did have a lot in common - but she'd just met a great guy on that site.

That last woman had been on that site for less than a *week*.


Only later did I realize why these things happened.
Women on dating sites are a minority. So they get flooded with messages. One of the female friends mentioned earlier told me she got on average 7 (!) messages a day.
Also, dating sites encourage people to make profiles for free - profiles they forget about, but the site can keep them practically forever to show how "many" members they have.

These are a few of the reasons why these dating sites failed to work. I could think of more reasons, but I'm sure they will be discussed in comments and future posts anyway.

So, I had tried online dating. Proof of the pudding is in the eating, and Cupid's online pudding tasted horrible.

But lately, people around me have started to talk about online dating again. I even know a *guy* who met his girlfriend on a dating site, and she's actually a fun girl!

I started thinking about this. Four years is a long time, and things change - especially on the internet. Maybe I should give online dating a second chance?

On the other hand, one definition of foolishness is to try the same thing and expect different results.

So here's the plan: I am going to see what is new in online dating.
I will not waste time on the sites I have already tried; I looked at them again before starting this. Their basic operation is still the same tried-and-disproven technology.
Instead, I will look at the more creative web services for finding Miss Right.

This blog will be a firsthand account of my exploration of innovative dating services.

Let's see if Cupid's recipe for pudding has improved!