Deciphering the Brain's Love Map

victor7 writes "Business Week Online is running a story about a new entrant into the online dating service market called Chemistry.com which has a unique approach to trying to match up subscribers. The goal is to try to programmatically decipher the subscriber's brain's 'love map' which they believe represents that chemistry that people have with each other." From the article: "There are other personality types as well that are based on chemistry. There are questions that tell us if you are good at abstract thinking, or quick to make decisions and act on them. It's not exactly like I'm going to light a fire between the two of you. It just raises the chances. Most people fall in love because they have shared values, but they stay in love because their personalities mesh. We're trying to increase the changes of finding that spark and joy and excitement you feel when personalities mesh."

Comments

Shouldn't we just

[rock217]

Scrap the whole "article" thing and just make this an ad for the online dating service market called Chemistry.com?

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I was bored, so I took the "test". It is rubbish, similar to anything you might find anywhere else. It is mostly long strings of inane questions like "I am spontaneous" (A) a little (B) somewhat (C) quite a bit (D) very much, or "I enjoy attending musical or sports events." I guess they couldn't get the rights to use the Meyers-Briggs.

Yes, there are one or two (actually three) weird flash games that use optical illusions ("line up these two sticks so they have the same length!") and they really do ask you to look at your fingers. No idea if any of that actually gets fed into the algorithm -- I imagine it's most likely just tossed in the rubbish and used to get stories posted on slashdot and BusinessWeek.

Anyway, I filled out the survey as honestly as possible (given the circumstances); I had to lie and say I live in Denver. The first "match" that came up was a rather unattractive 30 year old who described herself in her profile "headline" as a "Strong Christian" and was generally someone this 20 something grad student would not even class as datable.

So: mostly rubbish, IMO.

How about this?

[khasim]

First off http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/2 2/0248247&tid=191&tid=14

She's an anthropologist who implies that she can tell if you have high levels of serotonin just by asking you 100 questions about your past relationships and such.

From TFA:

One of the questions on Chemistry.com asks how long your index finger is compared to your ring finger. What's the significance of that?
We are measuring how much testosterone you were exposed to in the womb. There is new data that shows that the brain is patterned before birth. The length of the finger can give some clues as to how assertive they might be.

Now .... http://www.4-men.org/testosterone/testosterone-and -fingers.html A survey of the finger lengths of over 100 male and female academics at the University of Bath by senior Psychology lecturer Dr Mark Brosnan has found that those men teaching hard science like mathematics and physics tend to have index fingers as long as their ring fingers, a marker for unusually high estrogen levels for males.

It also found the reverse: those male academics with longer ring fingers than index fingers - the usual male pattern - tended not to be in science but in social science subjects such as psychology and education.

The study also found that these hormonal levels may make male scientists less likely to have children.

That's some damn good science stuff!

But (that's a joke, son!) there may be more to the reasoning why male scientists don't have children.....

Finger length is linked to sexual orientation! http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/fi nger_length_ratios.htm

Great. This seems to be the more of the crap "science" so popular today. Just because two characteristics appear in one group does NOT mean that there is any correlation between those characteristics.

There are similar sites already..

[Myself]

You should take a look at OKCupid.com if the idea intrigues you. They've got a set of eerily accurate personality tests, and some interesting math behind them. It's all free, run for fun by the same people who brought us TheSpark and SparkMatch, if you remember those.

Re:How the hell

[MoogMan]

http://web.archive.org/web/19970401113847/http://w ww.chemistry.com/

It was bought out.

Re:programatic

[utexaspunk]

Check out OKCupid.com. They have a phenomenal statistical matching algorithm. It's not going to tell you if there's physical attraction, or if there's romantic chemistry, but the people I've met on there that it said would be good matches for me really WERE my type, and not just on the basic stuff most dating websites consider (i.e., body type, religious preferences, etc). Their system collects so MUCH information -questions submitted by users that go far beyond the basics- and it weighs all of it properly- it really does an excellent job.

I met up with a girl from there last week when I was in NYC because it said she was a 90% match, which was the highest of all the users in their system. She was TOTALLY the kind of girl that I'd want to date, and we really got along well. Now if only I lived in NYC... :)