<![CDATA[io9: computer dating]]> http://tags.lifehacker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: computer dating]]> http://io9.com/tag/computerdating http://io9.com/tag/computerdating <![CDATA[What Happens When Security Cameras Get Involved With Matchmaking]]> What if Big Brother was hijacked by Big Cupid? DreamWorks' new movie Good Looking shows a future dating service that uses surveillance camera footage to match lonely hearts without fail. Well, almost without fail.

The project, just announced by the studio, is the product of screenwriter Chris McCoy, who came up with the idea after seeing the amount of anti-crime cameras while on vacation in the UK:

If someone could organize that information and know what everyone in London was doing and eating and who they're dating and who they're going home with, then that's an incredibly powerful tool... I think I have an oddball brain or something, but then I started thinking about how all that stuff could be applied to matchmaking. It would totally subvert Match.com and eHarmony, (where) I think people lie about who they are or they say what they think people will want them to be. But 'Good Looking,' my service, knows who they are and can put them together.

That doesn't mean that everything always works out, of course; the movie centers around the one person who turns down his computer-selected match, just to reassure mainstream audiences that matters of the heart are too wacky and unpredictable for machines to understand.

'Good Looking' catches Dreamworks' eye [Hollywood Reporter]

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<![CDATA[Meet Your Mate With Operation Match, the First Computer Dating Service (1965)]]> In 1965, two enterprising students from Harvard, Jack Tarr and Vaughan Morrill, dreamed up the idea of a computerized dating service. Aided by David Crump and Douglas Ginsburg (in 1987 he withdrew his name from nomination to the Supreme Court after admitting to—gasp!—smoking pot in college), they put their idea in motion and created "Operation Match." Clients paid $3.00 and filled out a 110-item questionnaire that, in addition to the usual statistics of age, height, weight, sex, included questions like the following . . .

My ideal date should be: 1] very sexually experienced 2] moderately sexually experienced 3] somewhat sexually experienced 4] sexually inexperienced 5] doesn't matter
The answers (punched on to IBM cards) were run through an Avco 1790 computer and the resulting names of "compatible" individuals sent to the client. Used by college students and denizens of Catskill resorts' "Singles Week" promotions, Operation Match was an unqualified success (at least for its creators): more than a million people used its services by the time it was sold in 1968.

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