Smart Photos

> how many people get enough matches to get any statistically useful information? The people that need this the most are the least likely to benefit.

Exactly. I totally agree with that.

I believe they also differentiate between immediate right-swipe, and profile view before right-swipe. Sometimes my top picture changes and I haven't had any matches in a while.

Or they're just fucking with me to keep my attention.

People are judging you based on a set of photos and a text blurb. Its already superficial.

To suggest that a swipe based on some different ordering of the photos makes it less superficial is kinda funny.

You can turn 'smart photos' off.

Then perhaps you shouldn't have that picture in your profile at all and you won't run into that problem.

Then you shouldn't use Tinder. Okcupid was trying to do smart matching between people but apparently everyone is lazy nowadays and prefers swiping on photos rather than reading. Welcome to 2017

Are you seriously concerned someone on tinder might pick you for a superficial reason?

Tinder calculates a rating for each user (ELO) using the data on right swipes (and other things). Then it only shows your profile to users with a similar rating. (Many users have documented this feauture)

Tinder wants the most influential users to recommend the app to their friends (on social media and in real life). Influential users are typically more desirable and have a higher rating.

So you should take all the right swipes you can get.

You're completely right.

I'm seeing a more general trend which I find equally worrying: Software is eating the world, and the best tech is currently produced by the likes of Facebook, Google or Amazon.

I'm fine with this, but I'm seeing governments and other "serious" businesses like health, physics... seriously lagging behind.

I don't know what to do with this assumption, though...

Google will run the world? I'm saying it's too good to be true.

It has to pay the bills. There is money to be made from the Echo Look so it gets developed first. For things that will help society but aren't profitable we will have to look to other funding sources.

It's things like this that bring machine learning to the masses, which also typically lowers costs and makes it more available for niche uses.

It's a lot easier and more forgiving to use machine learning to pick what picture or outfit you look best in than it is to use it in medicine or architecture. As the technology matures, you will see it move in to those sectors very rapidly.

First of all there is no machine learning used in the article.

Second, machine learning IS helping in places like physics and medicine. There's currently a one million dollar prize by google for an algorithm that can detect cancer (actually it just ended.) And there have been a number of similar contests in the past. Just look here for all sorts of places machine learning has been applied: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions?sortBy=deadline&group=al...

People have been applying statistics and AI to medicine since the 80's. The biggest problem is medicine and similar fields, is it's terribly conservative. It's very difficult to get new technology to market. Whereas tindr doesn't have any regulations or bureaucracy to deal with. They can just push new technology to millions of users overnight.

it's not too different from what Facebook does.

I'm guessing the reason was that this was born out of a hackathon. E-greedy is likely the easiest algorithm to implement for a MAB problem like this. Given that they mention there's an API to specify sort order (assuming it was on a per-view basis), the specific algorithm could be swapped out for something smarter.

I think a contextual bandit algorithm would be interesting in this case, although I wonder if there would be enough data behind photo swipes to back each context meaningfully.

No they do - if you go to your profile settings it shows the correct order. And you get a notification whenever it changes the top photo.

I think the algorithm solves the problem of which photo, out of a set of photos, is the best one to show. So nothing has changed regarding the mutuality aspect, only which photo of the user is their best photo based on data collected from past swipes. In other words, they're continuously rotating through a user's photos, trying to find the one that gets the most positive feedback and showing that one more often than the user's other photos.

Wow, amazing how consistent the crowd's impression are with my own, based on those tiny pics. We are prejudiced bunch.

I don't know about Tinder, but the (telecom) software development company I work for holds internal hackathons twice a year (one in May, one in November). We've been doing this for about 6 years, with over 150 attendees each time from offices around the UK. We normally have teams of 3-5, with a focus on innovation (e.g. bots, IoT, AI). Each runs for 24 hours from 17:00 on Thursday through to 17:00 on Friday when pitching/demos start (2 minutes each) followed by prizes and food/drinks/party. Any work produced belongs to the company (bear in mind this is mostly during work time) although we look at most innovative ideas for patent angles, and we get bonuses for patents that get filed as a result. Prizes are relatively token, but prestigious. Participation hasn't actively had to be encouraged - most engineers who are available attend. The main motivation for the hackathons are innovation and morale (everyone seems to enjoy them), but other benefits are education (learning new skills, languages, APIs, etc.), working with new people/teams and personal development (e.g. it's not unusual for new employees to take on technical lead roles that they wouldn't have normally).

We also hold "vacathons", which are hackathons just for the interns in the summer. There are about 50 attendees, and because they haven't always done too much software development beforehand, these are 3 days long and people are less likely to work through the night (although we lay on food in the evening, and people often stay until 10ish). The theme for these is more general - anything loosely to do with communication is accepted. As with the full hackathons, teams form and generate ideas themselves, but we also assign a mentor (a full-time employee) to each team to help them with any technical problems as well as planning/working as a team.

Hope that's informative!

This reads like it was written by a person on the hackathon team, who truly believed in his project. I sincerely doubt those two things were all the perks provided.

To me, he's just trying to paint a picture filled with drive. One where he planned on working overnight on something in which he believed. No need to insinuate tinder doesn't care about its engineers or draw cynical conclusions.

eat sleep code repeat

at least until interrupt fires such as HEART_ATTACK or WIFE_LEAVES_YOU_FOR_SALSA_INSTRUCTOR

basically prize is spend more time at work

Seems like someone never got a match...

I'd say worthiness of such algorithms and "fancy" curves from having the large data set of active people to test and learn from.