Short Story Fiction Contest May 2014 | Page 148

of a question to female users: “How expensive is your perfume?” The answer would factor into the algorithm by increasing a female user’s “femininity” variable if she purchased expensive perfume. Generally speaking, the higher the “femininity” variable, the better the male dates the woman would end up with. DateEx users quickly realized that fact, and the word spread through online forums: start buying more expensive perfume (or lying about it, which would still create the expectation among the general population that perfume was important).

The programmer who came up with that question now works for L’Oreal.

But, according to Mike and other DateEx programmers, the fatal flaw of DateEx was not the dozens of little bits of corruption that worked their way into the matching algorithm. The enterprise itself was too ambitious.

“Life just ended up being more complicated than we had considered, y'know? It’s one thing to design a site for people who want to date, but we had to predict and model the hopes, dreams, and preferences of 300 million people. They themselves don't know what they want romantically, and we suddenly had to understand each U.S. citizen better than they understood themselves.”

A Problem Unsolved

Supporters of the Partnership Act still point fingers at each other, trying to figure out where the law went off the rails.

Rep. Nancy Polenta assured me, "If we hadn't let that stupid BABEs group weaken the partner mandate, the Act would be looked at today as the greatest success in the history of the country."