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Comment by daturkel | Hacker News Reader

As a math guy who loves reality tv, I was also drawn to the show and wrote a blog post [0] about how to programmatically calculate the probabilities as the show progresses. It was a lot of fun optimizing it to be performant. You can `pip install ayto` to use it to follow along with the show or try out scenarios.

The linked post is a very thorough treatment of AYTO and a great read. I really like the "guess who" bit on how to maximize the value of guesses. It's a shame the participants aren't allowed to have pen and paper—it makes optimization a lot trickier! I'm impressed they do as well as they do.

[0]: https://danturkel.com/2023/01/25/math-code-are-you-the-one.h...

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Let's be friends :')

Loved your post, really enjoyed getting into the meat of it. I wanted to position mine to a layman, kept asking myself "can I explain this to my Dad?"

I think where the post falls short is the absence of a silver bullet that contestants can use to win the game sooner.

Thanks! Optimization was something I'd played with in previous rounds of coding up AYTO simulations, but not in the most recent version. (See the bottom section of this notebook [0]). There's also a very thorough treatment of the problem in a blog post from 2018 by SAS (the software company) [1]. It's surprising how many people have been drawn in by the allure of AYTO!

[0]: https://github.com/daturkel/pyto/blob/master/AYTO_S8.ipynb [1]: https://blogs.sas.com/content/operations/2018/08/14/are-you-...

And sometimes they just don't do better as a plot point, staying together an extra week after finding out they are not the one because of the intensity of their love (they met 4 days before)

Giving them more credit than they probably deserve but: when you're solving "by hand" like they are in the show, keeping a known non-match couple together may actually be helpful for interpreting the results of a matchup ceremony because you'll know that that couple didn't contribute to the beams.

That's different, they do that also, but sometimes for the plot one couple intentionally mess those plans because the love is just too big.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/55/

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