To prevent abuse, we need to ensure that
everyone taking the 8^8 test is a human
and not a bot. Click on all of the icons
below that represent animals.
And then the site is so slow it only shows me 5 of 7 images, the other two failing to load.
Good one.
Don't get me wrong, it's a cute idea, although I have to say that I'm not sure I'd get along with someone who thinks exactly as I do.
Edit: I've passed the spam test and started the "test" - most of the answers are "none of the above" or "any one of these 4". The usual frustrating experience. I mean:
And if there are always 3 animals (like on mine), then one out of every 35 (= 7 choose 3) bots will get through it anyway. Even if each picture is uniformly and independently an animal or non-animal, one out of every 128 bots will get through. If bots are a problem, maybe use a stronger captcha.
It sounds like a neat idea but it's taking too long to load for me to check it out. I'll try again later.
That either assumes a spammer makes the effort to program his bot to handle this problem or a bot so intelligent that it can interpret what this "proof you're human" task entails.
The second, I think, can be ignored for now. The first is fairly unlikely, given the current popularity of the site and what a spammer stands to gain (hm, maybe there is quite somewhat to gain. One could register a few million different fake profiles, and use them to find gullible clients for a "I would like to come and visit you, but need money for the trip" scam. Edit: maybe, this whole site is part of such a scam)
Also, if I were to make my bot aware of this "I'm human" test, I also would program in knowledge of the URLs or the pixels of the pictures used, and get a 100% success rate.
Took quite a while due to the site crashing several times, but I finished it.
I think of it as an interesting experiment - even if nothing ends up coming from it.
My largest concern is there are about 3 questions where I was torn between two answers. I'm thinking I should create email addresses to "cover every base" by alternating my answers on those 3 questions in every permutation. On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on and have to pay the small fee.
@ColinWright
>8^8 should be thought of less as a scientific black box, but as a friend who claims to know someone you'll hit it off with, and wants the two of you to get together. It might be wrong, but it could very well be right.
> On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on
I wonder what the legality of publishing their questions and answers are. If we can duplicate their questions and answers, people could find each other on twitter with a hashtag: #my8x8is{answer 1}{answer 2}...{answer 2}
I like your idea about the hashtag. I don't think that the definitive answers are the best approach (I'd prefer multiple answers), but it'd interesting if we were able to design a "format" that could be used to describe one's answers.
Haha, I really like that idea - it would be great if you could somehow make similar colors match similar people, but I guess that's not really feasible.
Yeah, it's the easiest approach if you allow only 1 answer. With multiple answers allowed we need 64 bits (using trivial encoding and representing each question/answers with 8 bits) or more, if each answer can be assigned "attribute"/priority (say user needs to order answers from the best to the worst).
What would this accomplish, other than perhaps not giving their email to 8x8?
If they have taken the 8x8 test to know their answers, they may as well enter an email address to be alerted when they have a match. Rather than checking Twitter, seeing as 8x8 already plans to email you if you have a match.
In theory if two Twitter users took the test and were a match - there would be no need to use a hashtag to tweet.
This could be useful if enough people participated and were interested in finding an "8x7" or even "8x6" match by changing their answer of two questions. But even then, you would need enough participants who use Twitter and are willing to tweet their answers.
I had the same feeling. I went through the 8 questions. If someone else answered as I did, I feel like it would be completely random chance. There wasn't anything personally identifying about the questions at all. This reminded me of
Presumably many more people are taking the test. They should have just hosted this on whatever google sheets does with questionnaires. It seems a bit silly to want millions of people to take your quiz, but not have the resources available to serve it.
My thoughts exactly! Most of my most interesting experiences has happened just because some one I was with at the time choose to do something that I would never have done.
As an introverted thinker, I need someone to challenge my ideas, not to reinforce them.
"Take the 8^8 test and the likelihood of someone else answering in the exact same pattern as yourself is 1 in 16,777,216"
That requires A) the distribution of answers is even across all 8 options, and B) there are zero correlations between any two answers in the quiz.
Not to mention that the 8 questions have to pretty accurately split the space of human personalities down into eigen-answers that explain the most variance in personality.
And there's just no way to do pick these questions without having the data to analyze in the first place.
It could be argued that certain types of people are more likely to exist and thus more are matched.
EG:
The very first question about what you do at a party.
The "sit on the couch and observe" type of person is probably one of the more rare options than the "center of attention" or "dancing with people" or whatever other options there were (I forget the options I didn't pick myself)
I'm not a party goer and there wasn't an option to not attend the party. So I'd be on the couch watching other people. Not particularly a popular thing to do at parties.
Even then, it’s all the more important to find the questions with the highest entropy, given that you know someone’s already in a popular group. It’s all about evenly dividing the population based on important factors. Evenly dividing people is easy enough, and finding important factors is easy enough, but doing them both at the same time can be very tricky.
That was an interesting read - though I skipped after the "game is over part". I'll have to go back and read the rest later for "what he should have done."
As an aside, I'm now worried about serial killers trained in using information theory to prevent themselves from being caught. Although not having a supernatural Death Note makes that a lot more difficult.
Even distribution is not the goal. Finding like-minded matches is the goal.
From a purely statistical standpoint - their claim is false about the roughly 1 in 16,777,216 chance. But the goal is to find like-minded people.
Let's create a 1 question True/False test. Let's assign the probability of answering True on the question is 70% and answering False is 30%.
You give the test to 100 people. You now have 35 pairings for "True" and 15 pairings for "False". Would it make sense to pair the "True" people with the "False" people to approach an "even distribution"? Only if your goal was to match people with "1 out of every 2 people" from a purely statistical standpoint of weighing 2 options.
The importance in this case is not distribution - but rather if these 8 questions determine who is "similar" in thinking to another person. If you asked someone their favorite color and their favorite pet - you might get a lot of matches. But many of those matches might be terrible with the people having little in common beyond that.
In the FAQ they take a step back and don't really guarantee good matching, even in the event of a match. However matches should be statistically rare (even if biased towards a specific 8 answers on the questions) and might still produce "good results". This makes it an interesting case study and one that can be tweaked and redone if we ever discover a way of asking only a few questions (I'd say no more than 10?) and accurately defining someones personality.
That's the way I see it at least. More of a case study than a statistical claim, even if they're trying to spin the statistics to spur people to take the 8 question quiz. Who knows, it may end up with a lot of good matches based on just-vague-enough questions and the likilihood of similar answers (even if, in some scenarios, fewer than the projected 16~ million and in other scenarios even more)
Even distribution is just important for doing it in as few questions as possible. If you want to do it in 8, and cover 16M distinct personalities, you're gonna need them to be very evenly distributed.
Information gain is maximized when the distribution is even.
Imagine a very extreme biased form of this where everyone answers the same way to a question, and that question is repeated 8 times with different wordings. You will only get 1 distinct personality type.
For a real-world example, take the myers briggs (MBTI) personality test. It only does 16 distinct personality types and takes about 50q to get right. Only way 8^8 beats that, without any data to predict the distributions and correlations out of the gate, or completely revolutionarily novel psychological theory, is with precogs.
There have been 0 matches with over 12,000 tests. Assuming their claim of 1/1,000~ is anywhere near remotely true - then you may have increased your chances of finding a 'good match' tenfold already with the assumption that matches will be good (there is of course the chance they won't be)
The Myers-Briggs places weight on questions to give one of the 16 personality types made of 8 traits. For example, one answer might give you 80% of INTJ and 20% INTP and by factoring the weights across all the questions will tell you if you were weighted more or less towards INTJ or INTP, even if you were more INTJ for that singular question.
In 8x8 the questions are not weighted in that way, which is an important difference. While there are 16 distinct personality traits in MBTI, there are only 8 traits. Questions can weigh towards those 8 traits in various ways. From my experience MBTI tests range from the 5 "strongly, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly" answer types and the questions are targeted to 2 (sometimes 4, but typically 2) traits.
Meaning if neutral is 50% : 50% (Not leaning towards introvert or extrovert) your answer to the question is effectively meaningless. However if you "agree" it might be 75% : 25% and if you "strongly agree" it could be 100% : 0%. You take the aggravated ratings of all the "I or E" type questions and determine if the user is introverted or extroverted based on which holds more weight across 50 questions.
8x8 does not weight the questions to determine personality traits. The questions must match exactly to determine a match. In comparison, Myers-Briggs can have two people be INTJ who answered questions very differently but their aggregated weights of each question added up to them both being an INTJ.
Again: this should be treated as a case study. Since questions aren't weighted, this is different than most personality tests. This isn't a personality test - but finding someone who thinks exactly as you do in regards to these 8 questions.
The largest flaw is if these are the wrong 8 questions to ask and if matches lean towards "good" or not. Which can be determined after enough matches. Making this a neat case study. :)
E:
TL;DR If 12,000 people took a MBTI I guarantee there would be many matches already. This isn't a personality test - this is a line of thinking test. Whether the questions will result in good matches or not will be left to when there are any matches to begin with.
the MBTI example and use of weighting only makes it more clear that this "case study" is dead from the start, because it shows it takes many questions just to ascertain someone's position on each eigenvector. For example, the most important explanatory personality trait is masculinity vs femininity. How do you ascertain that with one question and 8 answers? For example a question asking if you are male or female only tells you so much and not the whole story. none of the real underlying important explanatory variables can be directly measured with a question, or 8 questions.
And I highly doubt they have no matches in 10k samples, especially given the homogeneity of their audience. And if so then they are just measuring traits of personality that, while diversified, nobody cares about. Check out the birthday paradox. Even if there are 16M possibilities, the chance that two random people in 10,000 matched is much higher than you think.
If it were trying to match people based on their personalities and not their direct line of thinking - you would be correct.
Until the results speak for themselves (ie. accuracy of matches) you have no way of knowing if this is a complete failure or successful venture. Although you are free to speculate that it will be meaningless due to the methodology, you have no evidence to back that up yet.
Many dating sites work on a similar principle, although they all use weighted questions. Weighted questions for personality increase possible matches by narrowing down the preciseness necessary. The goal here is to decrease possible matches by requiring exact matches.
Dating sites want to match you with someone quickly who is "close enough" to be compatible based on a personality test and their user data of what answers pair well with other peoples' answers.
8x8 doesn't care how long it takes to find a match, they want an "exact match" to be compatible based on how you answer arbitrary questions.
8 questions was chosen because to have answers be "100% exact" are already rare. If they chose 50 questions - the chances of an exact match become increasingly rare as to possibly never exist in a persons' life time.
E:
The birthday paradox is 1/365, and I'm well aware of the statistics of someone out of a group of 20 random people sharing a birthday with another person of that same group.
and it only gets worse as possibilities become less evenly distributed! we are approaching 100% probability this is all bullshit and won't work at all.
According to the Reddit page the number of tests and matches found is accurate.
There were 11,300~ tests when the page last loaded for me. They are caching the results of the tests and refreshing non-live time in an attempt to put less stress on the server.
There were 0 matches at that time. While I'm wary of site-counters - I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
At 15,000~ there should be a match. So while pretty high at 12,000~ it's still in the realm of possibility that there is not a match, just very unlikely.
There's also the chance they haven't had the ability to check for matches because their servers been down so often so they haven't been calculating for them. So there is a chance that there is a match in the data but it hasn't been calculated and so wasn't showing when I checked at 11,300~
They intend to look for matches offline with a few days delay. The count of people who have taken it looks like it is updated live.
It is quite possible that they have not tried to do the match online. Given their demonstrated competence, I wouldn't be surprise if it comes as a shock to them that they can simply put results in a flat file, sort, and then scan them for matches very quickly...
Thank you for putting into clear words my gut impression that this wouldn't produce the intended result.
I wonder if you couldn't do better with binary questions. I'm reminded of the site http://www.correlated.org/.
Suppose you were to ask a bunch of binary questions, and then use some statistics to find questions that have fairly evenly distributed and non-correlated results, then take 24 of the best questions by those criteria (arbitrary, but 2^24 = 8^8) and find matches.
So basically, ask a whole bunch of binary questions, find ones with roughly 50-50 answers that don't correlate with each other, make the match-ups based on those and ignore the others.
okcupid does exactly this. Most of their questions are submitted by the users themselves, and they have hundreds if not thousands of them, but they present the questions to you in the order of most differentiating first. You can answer as many or as few as you want, but matches get better as you answer more, with monotonically diminishing returns. You also get to say which answers you would accept from your match (doesn't have to include your answer) and how much it matters if at all.
My gut tells me it's akin to doing principle component analysis. To find the most differentiating question, do 1 dimensional PCA, and the question most aligned with the resulting dimension is question #1. Then do 2 dimensional PCA fixing the first dimension as the first question. The result is question #2. And so on.
OF FAR GREATER CONCERN: They are collecting email addresses associated with personality questions. There is no privacy policy, other than the statement "If there's a match, we'll email you. (You will not be emailed under any other circumstances: no promos, no newsletters, nothing except news of a match.)" You don't know to whom you are giving this information, as there is no named legal entity, just a gmail address and a domain name whose registered owner is hidden in whois databases.
It's like a Gram-Schmidt process. You take one question, then you look at other questions given (quotiented by, projected on, etc) that question, and so on.
I suspect OKC can make much more accurate predictions than this site, as they have vastly more data (some users answer thousands of questions, most users who are active for more than a few months have answered a couple hundred), vastly more users to compare, and they are pretty savvy about statistical analysis (reading their old blog posts is quite educational on the subject).
But, even given all that data...I find about half of my 99% matches (of which I've talked to maybe a half dozen and gone on a date with maybe four) aren't particularly compatible or interesting, to me. There seem to be other factors at play that just aren't measurable. And, heck, maybe being just like someone else isn't what makes an ideal friend/lover/partner.
The survey instrument could be perfectly constructed and the methodology still grossly flawed.
Because the population only consists of people who are willing to take the test [and have internet access and speak English etc.] generalizing the data is problematic at best.
Very few of us are lucky enough to come across our
soulmate within our lifetimes. We tend to choose our
friends and spouses from the limited pool of people
available in our immediate vicinity: students at our
schools, people who live in our neighborhoods,
colleagues at our workplaces. Statistically, it is
extremely unlikely that we will come across our
soulmate.
First off, the notion of "soulmate" is bogus romantic nonsense, and the notion that the person most compatible with us is just like us is demonstrably false. My father and I were very similar to each other and fought and argued all the time, because we were both cantankerous, ornery and contrary.
My life-partner and I--who are as close to "soulmates" as anyone can be to that basically ridiculous idea--are very similar in some respects, very different in others. The areas where we complement each other are as important as the ones where we reinforce each other.
More importantly, the claim that there is some great unexplored mass of humanity where our "soulmate" lurks is bogus. There are only 5000 people in the world. Maybe fewer. If there were more we wouldn't keep running into each other all the time.
That is, the number of people in our tribe is surprisingly small, and anyone who is sufficiently similar to us to answer the questions the same way is already almost certainly a member of it, so dipping into the pool of random strangers across the world is unlikely to improve the odds much in most cases, and citing an anecdote or three--which some people will be tempted to do--does not change this fact. The human social graph is full of islands.
Finally, to work as advertised the test requires that answers to the questions are uncorrelated, which is almost certainly not the case. So most people will find themselves with hundreds of "soulmates", a very few will have none. Unique matches will be extremely rare.
It's a superficially fun idea that turns out to be more of a monument to the failure to understand probability than anything else.
It was a joke, but I found it funny - he explains it with "if there were more, I wouldn't bump into the same people all the time". In other words, his world (the set of people he normally encounters) is made of at most 5000 people.
Yeah, the site is painfully slow. A site with a multiple choice test should handle thousands of users at a time with a tiny server. How is this thing made?
I know this sounds mean-spirited, but it's not. I'd be interested to know how this was developed as an example of what not to do. I wonder what the architecture is (and how it could/should be improved).
Well to be honest after many attempts to try it out I started to get a bit frustrated and annoyed.
From the errors returned I'm pretty sure it's a PHP backend. Considering the expertise of the average PHP developer I don't think I need to say more (this might sound mean but it's not).
I really like the concept, but I find the implementation disappointing.
I know it sounds dumb, but I think of myself as being a rather odd person, and not just like, collecting human skulls odd. It's hard to explain, but I don't feel that most people would get me, or like me once they got to know me. I'd love to find someone who's just like me (sometimes), so when I first clicked, I was a little excited, perhaps naively so. I was disappointed to find that it was just eight multiple-choice questions, many of which I had a hard time answering. There was no nuance.
Fortunately there are many people who have a generic like towards oddity.
There are also plenty of people that only care about a few things important to them, and don't care much about extra oddities.
If you care about the feelings of someone, and you like them, that goes a long way towards them liking you. If you are non-judgemental about the oddities of others, that helps a lot too.
I've never tried the questionnaires on dating sites, but it seems you'd get better results with paired questions. Ask person A what they're looking for in attribute X. Ask person B to describe themselves in attribute X. So someone that is emotionally submissive that likes a partner that is emotionally dominant gets matched with someone that is emotionally dominant that prefers a partner that is emotionally submissive.
Of course that assumes that the person even consciously knows what they want. I don't know how true that is.
I love the idea! The "non-optimal" (location & time based) way of finding the people you spend your time with can be quite frustrating, if you think about it. I'm happy to have a great people around me, but why not meet more interesting people?
But, as others already pointed out, there are some problems with the current version:
* one could prefer multiple answers on some questions. I think that the test should allow for multiple answers and use ML/statistics to find close/closest matches. Using True/False (exact match) may not be the best. The "workaroud" would be to take several tests with all the permutations, but IMO that is a design flaw.
* the questions may not be the best. This is an interesting problem - how can we pick questions/attributes that would be a good "model" of human personality/mind/psychology?
* such test need to reach a lot of people and it may take a long time. Therefore, it needs to be done _right_ from the beginning, so that all the people take the same test.
Again - I love the concept and I'm glad that somebody it taking the time and effort to build this. IMO this has the potential to influence who you spend your time/life with - so it's very important to do this well.
I can't speak on behalf of anyone else, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want someone just like me as a best friend.
To assemble an effective RPG party, you need multiple roles, like warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. Effective RL social circles work the same way. I'm more of an interjecting quipsniper or a technical sidebarbarian, and I really rely on other people to carry the majority of a conversation. If I were to hang out with a copy of myself, there would be no conversation to add zingers, counterpoints, and trivia to.
There's only so much of that crap that other people can take before it gets annoying, so there's not much use in adding two to the same party, unless they're scripted, like Crow and Tom Servo.
Also, I have a theory of conversation that keys on conversational coefficients. If a group of people are having a conversation, you add together their coefficients. If the sum is one, you have a very natural, comfortable conversation. If it is less than one, you experience some uncomfortable lulls. If it is greater than one, some people get interrupted, can't finish sharing their thoughts, or are excluded. If the coefficient approaches two, separate simultaneous threads of conversation will form, and participants will spontaneously rearrange or split themselves between conversations so as to make each one have a coefficient sum as close to one as is possible.
People don't have a fixed coefficient. They can adjust it within a certain range, that is somewhat dependent on atmosphere and subject matter. For instance, a lecturer who can teach an entire class without losing the attention of the audience can stretch up to 1.0 for conversations, but probably only for that one topic. Someone who has trouble yielding conversational priority may have a lower limit somewhere above 0.5. I suspect that most people can easily handle a range from 0.2 to 0.5. But I max out at probably a 0.4, on very few topics, so my "soul mate" would need to be much more talkative than I am, not at the same level, because it would take at least three of me to have a good conversation.
There seems to be an awful lot of gratuitous negativity going on here.
The site was on Reddit yesterday, now it's on the front page of HN. Maybe the author can't throw a lot of resources at it, or they used the project as an excuse to learn a new stack. Who knows.
Maybe it was slow for you. Maybe it's not a mathematically sound idea. Maybe the questions aren't ideal. The CAPTCHA isn't ideal.
> There seems to be an awful lot of gratuitous negativity going on here.
There isn't much negativity above your comment, no-one above you has criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA. Were you referring to a specific comment without using the reply-to feature? Are you saying the HN community is "mean" about it?
Most people on HN are very positive even if the project is slow, because everyone knows what it means to be on the top page of HN.
I'm not sure why my comment seems negative to you, while the comment above doesn't. The person above was generalizing negatively about "the people here", and it seemed gratuitous because no-one had criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA before.
In other words, please hellban me now, because I didn't get what was negative in my first comment.
I'm not sure why you think I am critcising you. Parent post is talking about gratuitous negativity, and I wanted to make sure you understood what they meant by gratuitous negativity which, in the context of HN, has a specific meaning.
There's a difference between gratuitous negativity and criticism of an idea. To quote the article introducing the guideline:
> By [gratuitous negativity] we mean negativity that adds nothing of substance to a comment.
I would say that what I've seen here tends to be constructive. Even the criticisms of speed are not gratuitous - they're about an important issue affecting the site.
I do see some comments that are needlessly negative, so props for the reminder, but I wouldn't call it "an awful lot".
I don't see anyone being "mean," and I don't see anyone criticizing the author. Yes there's some negativity, but it's not negativity for the sake of being negative---they are fair points.
The idea of being 1 in 8x8 is a novel idea to me, but after reading a few comments here I found that it's not really sound.
One thing that really stands out to me that I haven't seen explicitly mentioned here is the fact that humans are not simply 8 dimensional. At a party, maybe sometimes I like to chill at the couch for a bit, then get to meet some new people, exchange some numbers, meet up with friends, etc...
And the same goes for any other question. $100k can go a long way, but I'd like to save some, spend some, donate some, etc.
Like I said, I like the idea of the project, but the idea that any open-ended question can have only 8 unique answers is not so sound.
This whole thing has been done before and in a way that allowed the questions to be crowdsourced, not just one person coming up with what he/she thinks are meaningful.
On OKCupid, There are thousands of questions, many of them penned by users. You choose which questions to answer, then mark how important this question is to you. You also choose the answer you want your partner to have. For example:
Are you looking for a partner to have children with?
[] yes
[] no
Answer(s) you’ll accept
[] yes
[] no
Importance
[] a little
[] somewhat
[] very
If this question were not at all important to you, you would just not answer it.
IIRC, OkCupid also has a "not at all important" option; that way, you could answer "yes" to the hypothetical question without caring about someone else's answer (while at the same time providing an answer for somebody else who does care about the answer).
"If you take the 8^8 test right now all our services will be 100% free for you. This offer is good only for those taking the 8^8 test before we reach the milestone of 1,000,000 tests taken. Thereafter, to cover server costs, there will be a modest fee for connecting with matches. "
--------
I'm usually pretty pessimistic about the motives of websites like these. For example, this site seems like a great way to get a huge database of marketing info associated with email addresses. Nowhere on the main page or in their faq does it say they won't be selling this data, so they probably will. Use your spam-address if you're going to do this!
That being said, someone just like me also wouldn't pay for a service that's likely going to sign them up for spam. Given that payment will be required long before the odds favour a match for me showing up, I think I'll just skip it.
I love the idea! Since I personally believe that every person has a 'perfect match'. To those who don't, consider the following:
1) You either do or don't get along with certain people.
2) This is determined by how they act, look and your dispositions to those actions and looks.
3) Given these terms for quantifying the amount of 'like' you feel towards a person, it follows that there are combinations of act/look that you absolutely loathe or love.
4) There exists a combination of act/look that is your perfect match, the combination that you love the most, ie. Your soulmate.
What does not follow is that you would like someone who, as the site puts it, is very much like you. I'm quite sure I couldn't stand myself in certain situations. Maybe your soulmate is actually someone who is entirely unlike you in certain aspects?
EDIT:
Also it's likely, at least in my case, that some of the questions don't have the options you'd pick. I guess it kinda proves that 8 options over 8 questions can't be used to arbitrarily identity a person.
Except that I'm fairly sure a lot of studies have shown that the more time you spend with someone, the more you like them (at least if you liked them to start with).
I suspect you're much more likely to find a good romantic partner by spending more quality time with people you initially like and find attractive, rather than spending all your effort trying to meet as many different people as possible.
Well, the 'matching' might be correct at a certain point in time, but people do change. These kind of questions might nail how people feel and think and act now, however what about the future? Relationships start and finish all the time because of the dynamic nature of people's personalities (even if the changes are small ones).
165 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadGood one.
Don't get me wrong, it's a cute idea, although I have to say that I'm not sure I'd get along with someone who thinks exactly as I do.
Edit: I've passed the spam test and started the "test" - most of the answers are "none of the above" or "any one of these 4". The usual frustrating experience. I mean:
How should I know?It sounds like a neat idea but it's taking too long to load for me to check it out. I'll try again later.
Whether I click on just the animals or all three of them is part of the test, right?
The second, I think, can be ignored for now. The first is fairly unlikely, given the current popularity of the site and what a spammer stands to gain (hm, maybe there is quite somewhat to gain. One could register a few million different fake profiles, and use them to find gullible clients for a "I would like to come and visit you, but need money for the trip" scam. Edit: maybe, this whole site is part of such a scam)
Also, if I were to make my bot aware of this "I'm human" test, I also would program in knowledge of the URLs or the pixels of the pictures used, and get a 100% success rate.
I think of it as an interesting experiment - even if nothing ends up coming from it.
My largest concern is there are about 3 questions where I was torn between two answers. I'm thinking I should create email addresses to "cover every base" by alternating my answers on those 3 questions in every permutation. On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on and have to pay the small fee.
@ColinWright
>8^8 should be thought of less as a scientific black box, but as a friend who claims to know someone you'll hit it off with, and wants the two of you to get together. It might be wrong, but it could very well be right.
I wonder what the legality of publishing their questions and answers are. If we can duplicate their questions and answers, people could find each other on twitter with a hashtag: #my8x8is{answer 1}{answer 2}...{answer 2}
It's 24 bits, so how about six hex digits, like HTML colour codes?
If they have taken the 8x8 test to know their answers, they may as well enter an email address to be alerted when they have a match. Rather than checking Twitter, seeing as 8x8 already plans to email you if you have a match.
In theory if two Twitter users took the test and were a match - there would be no need to use a hashtag to tweet.
This could be useful if enough people participated and were interested in finding an "8x7" or even "8x6" match by changing their answer of two questions. But even then, you would need enough participants who use Twitter and are willing to tweet their answers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
If you're vague enough, everyone is self-centred enough to believe that you're talking about them.
I would expect the distribution of the answers to be close to uniform too.
At best, 8^8 might expose someone who ends up making a lot of the same decisions as me. Boring!
As an introverted thinker, I need someone to challenge my ideas, not to reinforce them.
That requires A) the distribution of answers is even across all 8 options, and B) there are zero correlations between any two answers in the quiz.
Not to mention that the 8 questions have to pretty accurately split the space of human personalities down into eigen-answers that explain the most variance in personality.
And there's just no way to do pick these questions without having the data to analyze in the first place.
EG: The very first question about what you do at a party.
The "sit on the couch and observe" type of person is probably one of the more rare options than the "center of attention" or "dancing with people" or whatever other options there were (I forget the options I didn't pick myself)
I'm not a party goer and there wasn't an option to not attend the party. So I'd be on the couch watching other people. Not particularly a popular thing to do at parties.
Also see http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Anonymity for a discussion of information theory in identifying people.
As an aside, I'm now worried about serial killers trained in using information theory to prevent themselves from being caught. Although not having a supernatural Death Note makes that a lot more difficult.
From a purely statistical standpoint - their claim is false about the roughly 1 in 16,777,216 chance. But the goal is to find like-minded people.
Let's create a 1 question True/False test. Let's assign the probability of answering True on the question is 70% and answering False is 30%.
You give the test to 100 people. You now have 35 pairings for "True" and 15 pairings for "False". Would it make sense to pair the "True" people with the "False" people to approach an "even distribution"? Only if your goal was to match people with "1 out of every 2 people" from a purely statistical standpoint of weighing 2 options.
The importance in this case is not distribution - but rather if these 8 questions determine who is "similar" in thinking to another person. If you asked someone their favorite color and their favorite pet - you might get a lot of matches. But many of those matches might be terrible with the people having little in common beyond that.
In the FAQ they take a step back and don't really guarantee good matching, even in the event of a match. However matches should be statistically rare (even if biased towards a specific 8 answers on the questions) and might still produce "good results". This makes it an interesting case study and one that can be tweaked and redone if we ever discover a way of asking only a few questions (I'd say no more than 10?) and accurately defining someones personality.
That's the way I see it at least. More of a case study than a statistical claim, even if they're trying to spin the statistics to spur people to take the 8 question quiz. Who knows, it may end up with a lot of good matches based on just-vague-enough questions and the likilihood of similar answers (even if, in some scenarios, fewer than the projected 16~ million and in other scenarios even more)
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%2...
Information gain is maximized when the distribution is even.
Imagine a very extreme biased form of this where everyone answers the same way to a question, and that question is repeated 8 times with different wordings. You will only get 1 distinct personality type.
For a real-world example, take the myers briggs (MBTI) personality test. It only does 16 distinct personality types and takes about 50q to get right. Only way 8^8 beats that, without any data to predict the distributions and correlations out of the gate, or completely revolutionarily novel psychological theory, is with precogs.
The Myers-Briggs places weight on questions to give one of the 16 personality types made of 8 traits. For example, one answer might give you 80% of INTJ and 20% INTP and by factoring the weights across all the questions will tell you if you were weighted more or less towards INTJ or INTP, even if you were more INTJ for that singular question.
In 8x8 the questions are not weighted in that way, which is an important difference. While there are 16 distinct personality traits in MBTI, there are only 8 traits. Questions can weigh towards those 8 traits in various ways. From my experience MBTI tests range from the 5 "strongly, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly" answer types and the questions are targeted to 2 (sometimes 4, but typically 2) traits.
Meaning if neutral is 50% : 50% (Not leaning towards introvert or extrovert) your answer to the question is effectively meaningless. However if you "agree" it might be 75% : 25% and if you "strongly agree" it could be 100% : 0%. You take the aggravated ratings of all the "I or E" type questions and determine if the user is introverted or extroverted based on which holds more weight across 50 questions.
8x8 does not weight the questions to determine personality traits. The questions must match exactly to determine a match. In comparison, Myers-Briggs can have two people be INTJ who answered questions very differently but their aggregated weights of each question added up to them both being an INTJ.
Again: this should be treated as a case study. Since questions aren't weighted, this is different than most personality tests. This isn't a personality test - but finding someone who thinks exactly as you do in regards to these 8 questions.
The largest flaw is if these are the wrong 8 questions to ask and if matches lean towards "good" or not. Which can be determined after enough matches. Making this a neat case study. :)
E:
TL;DR If 12,000 people took a MBTI I guarantee there would be many matches already. This isn't a personality test - this is a line of thinking test. Whether the questions will result in good matches or not will be left to when there are any matches to begin with.
And I highly doubt they have no matches in 10k samples, especially given the homogeneity of their audience. And if so then they are just measuring traits of personality that, while diversified, nobody cares about. Check out the birthday paradox. Even if there are 16M possibilities, the chance that two random people in 10,000 matched is much higher than you think.
Until the results speak for themselves (ie. accuracy of matches) you have no way of knowing if this is a complete failure or successful venture. Although you are free to speculate that it will be meaningless due to the methodology, you have no evidence to back that up yet.
Many dating sites work on a similar principle, although they all use weighted questions. Weighted questions for personality increase possible matches by narrowing down the preciseness necessary. The goal here is to decrease possible matches by requiring exact matches.
Dating sites want to match you with someone quickly who is "close enough" to be compatible based on a personality test and their user data of what answers pair well with other peoples' answers.
8x8 doesn't care how long it takes to find a match, they want an "exact match" to be compatible based on how you answer arbitrary questions.
8 questions was chosen because to have answers be "100% exact" are already rare. If they chose 50 questions - the chances of an exact match become increasingly rare as to possibly never exist in a persons' life time.
E:
The birthday paradox is 1/365, and I'm well aware of the statistics of someone out of a group of 20 random people sharing a birthday with another person of that same group.
There were 11,300~ tests when the page last loaded for me. They are caching the results of the tests and refreshing non-live time in an attempt to put less stress on the server.
There were 0 matches at that time. While I'm wary of site-counters - I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
E: The formula is
P(N) = 1 - prod[ 1 - (i-1)/(88 ) , i = 1,2,3,...N]
At 15,000~ there should be a match. So while pretty high at 12,000~ it's still in the realm of possibility that there is not a match, just very unlikely.
There's also the chance they haven't had the ability to check for matches because their servers been down so often so they haven't been calculating for them. So there is a chance that there is a match in the data but it hasn't been calculated and so wasn't showing when I checked at 11,300~
It is quite possible that they have not tried to do the match online. Given their demonstrated competence, I wouldn't be surprise if it comes as a shock to them that they can simply put results in a flat file, sort, and then scan them for matches very quickly...
You mean, for 2 people? It's higher than that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
I really don't believe their number of matches. Why... We're on the Internet, it's full of trolls.
I'm sure any number of people will have taken the test at two different locations and answered the questions the same, just to get a match.
How many people have you killed?
a) 0
b) 1-9
c) 10-99
d) 100-999
e) 1000 or more
Do you have a Y chromosome? a) Yes b) No
Do you have two X chromosomes: a) Yes b) No
Each are 50-50 questions, but the answer to A is correlated to the answer to B.
It's hard to find questions whose answers are independent variables.
A) how many people don't understand the questions
B) how many people understand the questions but don't choose to answer "correctly" e.g. transgender. E.g. smart arse Yes, Yes answers.
C) correlation with a third variable e.g. sampling bias (HN readers that answer internet surveys).
I wonder if you couldn't do better with binary questions. I'm reminded of the site http://www.correlated.org/.
Suppose you were to ask a bunch of binary questions, and then use some statistics to find questions that have fairly evenly distributed and non-correlated results, then take 24 of the best questions by those criteria (arbitrary, but 2^24 = 8^8) and find matches.
So basically, ask a whole bunch of binary questions, find ones with roughly 50-50 answers that don't correlate with each other, make the match-ups based on those and ignore the others.
My gut tells me it's akin to doing principle component analysis. To find the most differentiating question, do 1 dimensional PCA, and the question most aligned with the resulting dimension is question #1. Then do 2 dimensional PCA fixing the first dimension as the first question. The result is question #2. And so on.
OF FAR GREATER CONCERN: They are collecting email addresses associated with personality questions. There is no privacy policy, other than the statement "If there's a match, we'll email you. (You will not be emailed under any other circumstances: no promos, no newsletters, nothing except news of a match.)" You don't know to whom you are giving this information, as there is no named legal entity, just a gmail address and a domain name whose registered owner is hidden in whois databases.
Or a decision tree, maybe
But, even given all that data...I find about half of my 99% matches (of which I've talked to maybe a half dozen and gone on a date with maybe four) aren't particularly compatible or interesting, to me. There seem to be other factors at play that just aren't measurable. And, heck, maybe being just like someone else isn't what makes an ideal friend/lover/partner.
Because the population only consists of people who are willing to take the test [and have internet access and speak English etc.] generalizing the data is problematic at best.
My life-partner and I--who are as close to "soulmates" as anyone can be to that basically ridiculous idea--are very similar in some respects, very different in others. The areas where we complement each other are as important as the ones where we reinforce each other.
More importantly, the claim that there is some great unexplored mass of humanity where our "soulmate" lurks is bogus. There are only 5000 people in the world. Maybe fewer. If there were more we wouldn't keep running into each other all the time.
That is, the number of people in our tribe is surprisingly small, and anyone who is sufficiently similar to us to answer the questions the same way is already almost certainly a member of it, so dipping into the pool of random strangers across the world is unlikely to improve the odds much in most cases, and citing an anecdote or three--which some people will be tempted to do--does not change this fact. The human social graph is full of islands.
Finally, to work as advertised the test requires that answers to the questions are uncorrelated, which is almost certainly not the case. So most people will find themselves with hundreds of "soulmates", a very few will have none. Unique matches will be extremely rare.
It's a superficially fun idea that turns out to be more of a monument to the failure to understand probability than anything else.
As you point out, too much similarity can adversely impact compatibility. Conversely, lack of similarity is often times a positive thing.
And they at the bottom say 11k matches so far... too bad I like the premise!
From the errors returned I'm pretty sure it's a PHP backend. Considering the expertise of the average PHP developer I don't think I need to say more (this might sound mean but it's not).
I know it sounds dumb, but I think of myself as being a rather odd person, and not just like, collecting human skulls odd. It's hard to explain, but I don't feel that most people would get me, or like me once they got to know me. I'd love to find someone who's just like me (sometimes), so when I first clicked, I was a little excited, perhaps naively so. I was disappointed to find that it was just eight multiple-choice questions, many of which I had a hard time answering. There was no nuance.
There are also plenty of people that only care about a few things important to them, and don't care much about extra oddities.
If you care about the feelings of someone, and you like them, that goes a long way towards them liking you. If you are non-judgemental about the oddities of others, that helps a lot too.
Of course that assumes that the person even consciously knows what they want. I don't know how true that is.
But, as others already pointed out, there are some problems with the current version:
* one could prefer multiple answers on some questions. I think that the test should allow for multiple answers and use ML/statistics to find close/closest matches. Using True/False (exact match) may not be the best. The "workaroud" would be to take several tests with all the permutations, but IMO that is a design flaw.
* the questions may not be the best. This is an interesting problem - how can we pick questions/attributes that would be a good "model" of human personality/mind/psychology?
* such test need to reach a lot of people and it may take a long time. Therefore, it needs to be done _right_ from the beginning, so that all the people take the same test.
Again - I love the concept and I'm glad that somebody it taking the time and effort to build this. IMO this has the potential to influence who you spend your time/life with - so it's very important to do this well.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/9/
To assemble an effective RPG party, you need multiple roles, like warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. Effective RL social circles work the same way. I'm more of an interjecting quipsniper or a technical sidebarbarian, and I really rely on other people to carry the majority of a conversation. If I were to hang out with a copy of myself, there would be no conversation to add zingers, counterpoints, and trivia to.
There's only so much of that crap that other people can take before it gets annoying, so there's not much use in adding two to the same party, unless they're scripted, like Crow and Tom Servo.
Also, I have a theory of conversation that keys on conversational coefficients. If a group of people are having a conversation, you add together their coefficients. If the sum is one, you have a very natural, comfortable conversation. If it is less than one, you experience some uncomfortable lulls. If it is greater than one, some people get interrupted, can't finish sharing their thoughts, or are excluded. If the coefficient approaches two, separate simultaneous threads of conversation will form, and participants will spontaneously rearrange or split themselves between conversations so as to make each one have a coefficient sum as close to one as is possible.
People don't have a fixed coefficient. They can adjust it within a certain range, that is somewhat dependent on atmosphere and subject matter. For instance, a lecturer who can teach an entire class without losing the attention of the audience can stretch up to 1.0 for conversations, but probably only for that one topic. Someone who has trouble yielding conversational priority may have a lower limit somewhere above 0.5. I suspect that most people can easily handle a range from 0.2 to 0.5. But I max out at probably a 0.4, on very few topics, so my "soul mate" would need to be much more talkative than I am, not at the same level, because it would take at least three of me to have a good conversation.
The site was on Reddit yesterday, now it's on the front page of HN. Maybe the author can't throw a lot of resources at it, or they used the project as an excuse to learn a new stack. Who knows.
Maybe it was slow for you. Maybe it's not a mathematically sound idea. Maybe the questions aren't ideal. The CAPTCHA isn't ideal.
Who cares? There's no need to be mean about it.
There isn't much negativity above your comment, no-one above you has criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA. Were you referring to a specific comment without using the reply-to feature? Are you saying the HN community is "mean" about it?
Most people on HN are very positive even if the project is slow, because everyone knows what it means to be on the top page of HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317916
In other words, please hellban me now, because I didn't get what was negative in my first comment.
I don't have any power to hellban you!
> By [gratuitous negativity] we mean negativity that adds nothing of substance to a comment.
I would say that what I've seen here tends to be constructive. Even the criticisms of speed are not gratuitous - they're about an important issue affecting the site.
I do see some comments that are needlessly negative, so props for the reminder, but I wouldn't call it "an awful lot".
The idea of being 1 in 8x8 is a novel idea to me, but after reading a few comments here I found that it's not really sound.
One thing that really stands out to me that I haven't seen explicitly mentioned here is the fact that humans are not simply 8 dimensional. At a party, maybe sometimes I like to chill at the couch for a bit, then get to meet some new people, exchange some numbers, meet up with friends, etc...
And the same goes for any other question. $100k can go a long way, but I'd like to save some, spend some, donate some, etc.
Like I said, I like the idea of the project, but the idea that any open-ended question can have only 8 unique answers is not so sound.
On OKCupid, There are thousands of questions, many of them penned by users. You choose which questions to answer, then mark how important this question is to you. You also choose the answer you want your partner to have. For example:
Are you looking for a partner to have children with? [] yes [] no
Answer(s) you’ll accept [] yes [] no
Importance [] a little [] somewhat [] very
If this question were not at all important to you, you would just not answer it.
I liked this until they said "soulmate" it works much better as a weird sort of atsy project.
--------
I'm usually pretty pessimistic about the motives of websites like these. For example, this site seems like a great way to get a huge database of marketing info associated with email addresses. Nowhere on the main page or in their faq does it say they won't be selling this data, so they probably will. Use your spam-address if you're going to do this!
That being said, someone just like me also wouldn't pay for a service that's likely going to sign them up for spam. Given that payment will be required long before the odds favour a match for me showing up, I think I'll just skip it.
1) You either do or don't get along with certain people.
2) This is determined by how they act, look and your dispositions to those actions and looks.
3) Given these terms for quantifying the amount of 'like' you feel towards a person, it follows that there are combinations of act/look that you absolutely loathe or love.
4) There exists a combination of act/look that is your perfect match, the combination that you love the most, ie. Your soulmate.
What does not follow is that you would like someone who, as the site puts it, is very much like you. I'm quite sure I couldn't stand myself in certain situations. Maybe your soulmate is actually someone who is entirely unlike you in certain aspects?
EDIT:
Also it's likely, at least in my case, that some of the questions don't have the options you'd pick. I guess it kinda proves that 8 options over 8 questions can't be used to arbitrarily identity a person.
I suspect you're much more likely to find a good romantic partner by spending more quality time with people you initially like and find attractive, rather than spending all your effort trying to meet as many different people as possible.
Where do we disagree?