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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

I saw an episode of this and felt the contestants didn’t seem that interested in winning the money. Just romance. I was curious how suboptimally they tended to play.

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Everything is lined up for sub-optimal play.

For a start, the setting is an emotive one. It's not just a numeric game with arbitrary tokens, it's about "the perfect romantic partner." It would take an unusually self-isolating human to not identify who they feel their perfect match should be and bias towards that, subconsciously or consciously. We (nearly) all seek connection.

Then, it's reality TV. Contestants will be chosen for emotional volatility, and relentlessly manipulated to generate drama. No-one is going to watch a full season of a handful of math nerds take a few minutes to progress a worksheet towards a solution each week coupled with whatever they do to pass the time otherwise.

I'd watch a game show where you put a variety of math nerds on each team and watch them argue about the optimal strategy. Who's strategy will win? The quant analyst or the bioinformatician? Tune in next week!

Reminds me a bit of Devils Plan, or other similar reality game shows in Korea / Asia.

Watched a fantastic film about this on the plane a few years ago, "Liar Game - Reborn". There is some fairly sophisticated logic puzzling and scheming going on (see e.g. sample illustration https://imgur.com/a/0AOb67G from an interlude about 50min in where there are 3 groups of people who mutually distrust each other, each know a secret collection of 3-4 integers unique to their group, and want to deniably pass share integers with each other which are "not my team's". Another participant watches what happened and realizes in retrospect this is how the info was shared.)

A lot more upbeat than "Alice in Borderland".

I saw a couple devils plan and felt they were trying to imply Mathematical scheming without substance. There was one guy who kept talking about “science” but then his “game theory” for a game of mafia was “social distancing” like Covid…

Need to find out their psycopath screening technique

Just Ask them to describe Shannon Entropy. If they start talking about information they are out, if they start talking about their crazy cousin they are in.

Charlie Brooker did a good bit (in 2007!) about picking the right candidates for a mock reality TV show: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NGkJxju3uKo

We need a ManningCast version of the show. For those unaware, ManningCast is a show following an NFL game with special guests and nontraditional commentary and analysis. Think of it kind of like having the Mannings in the living room while watching an NFL game.

In my hypothetical version of "Are you the one?", the math nerds would be giving commentary and explaining the math behind how they'll solve "Are you the one?" while also hilariously explaining how foolish the contestants' theories are.

> No-one is going to watch a full season of a handful of math nerds take a few minutes to progress a worksheet towards a solution each week coupled with whatever they do to pass the time otherwise.

Um, what about those of us who watch Blood on the Clocktower streams?

Both of you are the exceptions that prove the rule?

That's because the real game is occurring both before and after the show in modern reality tv competitions. The goal is to be entertaining and get social media followers and potential invites to further reality tv shows.

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