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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Another reason to oppose gay marriage: the stable straight marriage problem is solvable, and there is a fairly simple algorithm to solve it. It heavily uses the fact that preferences form a bipartite graph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem

In general, the stable roommate/gay marriage problem does not always have a solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_roommates_problem

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"This is different from the stable marriage problem in that the stable roommates problem does not require that a set is broken up into male and female subsets. Any person can prefer anyone in the same set."

You know that not all gay people prefer all other gay people? If a gay man prefers a gay woman, we call them straight.

I call them bisexual, anyway.

You'd be wrong.

You know that not all straight men prefer all other straight women?

That's why the stable marriage problem is non-trivial. If all men preferred all women equally, any set of marriages would be stable.

The set of gay men isn't broken up into male and female subsets, and neither is the set of gay women. You don't have this cross-set matching which seems necessary for the stable marriage problem: you indeed have a single-set stable roommates problem, or perhaps two such single-set problems, one for gay men and one for lesbians.

That's really not Another reason to oppose gay marriage :) (I assume your being as tongue in cheek as the article).

Because the pool of marital age humans is constantly growing (and changing) the stable straight marriage problem can pretty much be considered insoluble :)

Also, the real-world "marriage problem" (even restricted to heterosexuals) is characterized by radically incomplete information. Moreover, it's dynamic; peoples' levels of desirability change radically over time. People can't actually "try out" 10+ pairings and not be damaged by it.

> People can't actually "try out" 10+ pairings and not be damaged by it.

Huh?

I suppose that it depends on what you mean by "try out". Obviously you can't live with each of those pairings for 15 years.

Huh?

Most people seem to find breakups rather painful.

Pain and damage are different.

I mean serious relationships.

Dating 10+ people in one's life is normal, obviously.

It is another reason. The first reason is that it causes problems for database admins. The fact that it also causes problems for graph theorists is another reason.

Good links; but the moral opinion not so much.

I doubt the individual above sincerely believes that game theory problems have any practical relevancy to homosexuals marrying. It was a joke along the same lines as the article.

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