8^8 – Find another you
8x8x8x8x8x8x8x8.com
8x8x8x8x8x8x8x8.com
That requires A) the distribution of answers is even across all 8 options, and B) there are zero correlations between any two answers in the quiz.
Not to mention that the 8 questions have to pretty accurately split the space of human personalities down into eigen-answers that explain the most variance in personality.
And there's just no way to do pick these questions without having the data to analyze in the first place.
I wonder if you couldn't do better with binary questions. I'm reminded of the site http://www.correlated.org/.
Suppose you were to ask a bunch of binary questions, and then use some statistics to find questions that have fairly evenly distributed and non-correlated results, then take 24 of the best questions by those criteria (arbitrary, but 2^24 = 8^8) and find matches.
So basically, ask a whole bunch of binary questions, find ones with roughly 50-50 answers that don't correlate with each other, make the match-ups based on those and ignore the others.
My gut tells me it's akin to doing principle component analysis. To find the most differentiating question, do 1 dimensional PCA, and the question most aligned with the resulting dimension is question #1. Then do 2 dimensional PCA fixing the first dimension as the first question. The result is question #2. And so on.
OF FAR GREATER CONCERN: They are collecting email addresses associated with personality questions. There is no privacy policy, other than the statement "If there's a match, we'll email you. (You will not be emailed under any other circumstances: no promos, no newsletters, nothing except news of a match.)" You don't know to whom you are giving this information, as there is no named legal entity, just a gmail address and a domain name whose registered owner is hidden in whois databases.
But, even given all that data...I find about half of my 99% matches (of which I've talked to maybe a half dozen and gone on a date with maybe four) aren't particularly compatible or interesting, to me. There seem to be other factors at play that just aren't measurable. And, heck, maybe being just like someone else isn't what makes an ideal friend/lover/partner.
Or a decision tree, maybe
EG: The very first question about what you do at a party.
The "sit on the couch and observe" type of person is probably one of the more rare options than the "center of attention" or "dancing with people" or whatever other options there were (I forget the options I didn't pick myself)
I'm not a party goer and there wasn't an option to not attend the party. So I'd be on the couch watching other people. Not particularly a popular thing to do at parties.
From a purely statistical standpoint - their claim is false about the roughly 1 in 16,777,216 chance. But the goal is to find like-minded people.
Let's create a 1 question True/False test. Let's assign the probability of answering True on the question is 70% and answering False is 30%.
You give the test to 100 people. You now have 35 pairings for "True" and 15 pairings for "False". Would it make sense to pair the "True" people with the "False" people to approach an "even distribution"? Only if your goal was to match people with "1 out of every 2 people" from a purely statistical standpoint of weighing 2 options.
The importance in this case is not distribution - but rather if these 8 questions determine who is "similar" in thinking to another person. If you asked someone their favorite color and their favorite pet - you might get a lot of matches. But many of those matches might be terrible with the people having little in common beyond that.
In the FAQ they take a step back and don't really guarantee good matching, even in the event of a match. However matches should be statistically rare (even if biased towards a specific 8 answers on the questions) and might still produce "good results". This makes it an interesting case study and one that can be tweaked and redone if we ever discover a way of asking only a few questions (I'd say no more than 10?) and accurately defining someones personality.
That's the way I see it at least. More of a case study than a statistical claim, even if they're trying to spin the statistics to spur people to take the 8 question quiz. Who knows, it may end up with a lot of good matches based on just-vague-enough questions and the likilihood of similar answers (even if, in some scenarios, fewer than the projected 16~ million and in other scenarios even more)
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%2...
Information gain is maximized when the distribution is even.
Imagine a very extreme biased form of this where everyone answers the same way to a question, and that question is repeated 8 times with different wordings. You will only get 1 distinct personality type.
For a real-world example, take the myers briggs (MBTI) personality test. It only does 16 distinct personality types and takes about 50q to get right. Only way 8^8 beats that, without any data to predict the distributions and correlations out of the gate, or completely revolutionarily novel psychological theory, is with precogs.
The Myers-Briggs places weight on questions to give one of the 16 personality types made of 8 traits. For example, one answer might give you 80% of INTJ and 20% INTP and by factoring the weights across all the questions will tell you if you were weighted more or less towards INTJ or INTP, even if you were more INTJ for that singular question.
In 8x8 the questions are not weighted in that way, which is an important difference. While there are 16 distinct personality traits in MBTI, there are only 8 traits. Questions can weigh towards those 8 traits in various ways. From my experience MBTI tests range from the 5 "strongly, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly" answer types and the questions are targeted to 2 (sometimes 4, but typically 2) traits.
Meaning if neutral is 50% : 50% (Not leaning towards introvert or extrovert) your answer to the question is effectively meaningless. However if you "agree" it might be 75% : 25% and if you "strongly agree" it could be 100% : 0%. You take the aggravated ratings of all the "I or E" type questions and determine if the user is introverted or extroverted based on which holds more weight across 50 questions.
8x8 does not weight the questions to determine personality traits. The questions must match exactly to determine a match. In comparison, Myers-Briggs can have two people be INTJ who answered questions very differently but their aggregated weights of each question added up to them both being an INTJ.
Again: this should be treated as a case study. Since questions aren't weighted, this is different than most personality tests. This isn't a personality test - but finding someone who thinks exactly as you do in regards to these 8 questions.
The largest flaw is if these are the wrong 8 questions to ask and if matches lean towards "good" or not. Which can be determined after enough matches. Making this a neat case study. :)
E:
TL;DR If 12,000 people took a MBTI I guarantee there would be many matches already. This isn't a personality test - this is a line of thinking test. Whether the questions will result in good matches or not will be left to when there are any matches to begin with.
And I highly doubt they have no matches in 10k samples, especially given the homogeneity of their audience. And if so then they are just measuring traits of personality that, while diversified, nobody cares about. Check out the birthday paradox. Even if there are 16M possibilities, the chance that two random people in 10,000 matched is much higher than you think.
Until the results speak for themselves (ie. accuracy of matches) you have no way of knowing if this is a complete failure or successful venture. Although you are free to speculate that it will be meaningless due to the methodology, you have no evidence to back that up yet.
Many dating sites work on a similar principle, although they all use weighted questions. Weighted questions for personality increase possible matches by narrowing down the preciseness necessary. The goal here is to decrease possible matches by requiring exact matches.
Dating sites want to match you with someone quickly who is "close enough" to be compatible based on a personality test and their user data of what answers pair well with other peoples' answers.
8x8 doesn't care how long it takes to find a match, they want an "exact match" to be compatible based on how you answer arbitrary questions.
8 questions was chosen because to have answers be "100% exact" are already rare. If they chose 50 questions - the chances of an exact match become increasingly rare as to possibly never exist in a persons' life time.
E:
The birthday paradox is 1/365, and I'm well aware of the statistics of someone out of a group of 20 random people sharing a birthday with another person of that same group.
It is quite possible that they have not tried to do the match online. Given their demonstrated competence, I wouldn't be surprise if it comes as a shock to them that they can simply put results in a flat file, sort, and then scan them for matches very quickly...
There were 11,300~ tests when the page last loaded for me. They are caching the results of the tests and refreshing non-live time in an attempt to put less stress on the server.
There were 0 matches at that time. While I'm wary of site-counters - I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
E: The formula is
P(N) = 1 - prod[ 1 - (i-1)/(88 ) , i = 1,2,3,...N]
At 15,000~ there should be a match. So while pretty high at 12,000~ it's still in the realm of possibility that there is not a match, just very unlikely.
There's also the chance they haven't had the ability to check for matches because their servers been down so often so they haven't been calculating for them. So there is a chance that there is a match in the data but it hasn't been calculated and so wasn't showing when I checked at 11,300~
(1 - reduce(operator.mul, map(lambda a: (8 ** 8.0 - a) / 8 ** 8, range(12000)))) * 100.0You mean, for 2 people? It's higher than that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
I really don't believe their number of matches. Why... We're on the Internet, it's full of trolls.
I'm sure any number of people will have taken the test at two different locations and answered the questions the same, just to get a match.
Also see http://www.gwern.net/Death%20Note%20Anonymity for a discussion of information theory in identifying people.
As an aside, I'm now worried about serial killers trained in using information theory to prevent themselves from being caught. Although not having a supernatural Death Note makes that a lot more difficult.
How many people have you killed?
a) 0
b) 1-9
c) 10-99
d) 100-999
e) 1000 or more
Do you have a Y chromosome? a) Yes b) No
Do you have two X chromosomes: a) Yes b) No
Each are 50-50 questions, but the answer to A is correlated to the answer to B.
It's hard to find questions whose answers are independent variables.
A) how many people don't understand the questions
B) how many people understand the questions but don't choose to answer "correctly" e.g. transgender. E.g. smart arse Yes, Yes answers.
C) correlation with a third variable e.g. sampling bias (HN readers that answer internet surveys).
Because the population only consists of people who are willing to take the test [and have internet access and speak English etc.] generalizing the data is problematic at best.
So I'm trying to understand the phenomenon:
- HN folks are bookmarking it for later based on comments (even though it may/may not be worthy of a +1)
- HN folks are +1'ing it based on the idea derived from the comments
- Those +1'ing it are actually able to make it through (though it doesn't seem so based on most of the comments)
The fascinating part to me is that, assuming it's one of the first two, how much +1's an (arguably) broken link can get based on comments.
The idea sounds interesting, and the site may very well be +1 worthy.
Also, you also have to account for people who clicked +1 in the early life of the link, where it wasn't being crushed, and lead more people to it.
At best, 8^8 might expose someone who ends up making a lot of the same decisions as me. Boring!
As an introverted thinker, I need someone to challenge my ideas, not to reinforce them.
Very few of us are lucky enough to come across our
soulmate within our lifetimes. We tend to choose our
friends and spouses from the limited pool of people
available in our immediate vicinity: students at our
schools, people who live in our neighborhoods,
colleagues at our workplaces. Statistically, it is
extremely unlikely that we will come across our
soulmate.
My life-partner and I--who are as close to "soulmates" as anyone can be to that basically ridiculous idea--are very similar in some respects, very different in others. The areas where we complement each other are as important as the ones where we reinforce each other.
More importantly, the claim that there is some great unexplored mass of humanity where our "soulmate" lurks is bogus. There are only 5000 people in the world. Maybe fewer. If there were more we wouldn't keep running into each other all the time.
That is, the number of people in our tribe is surprisingly small, and anyone who is sufficiently similar to us to answer the questions the same way is already almost certainly a member of it, so dipping into the pool of random strangers across the world is unlikely to improve the odds much in most cases, and citing an anecdote or three--which some people will be tempted to do--does not change this fact. The human social graph is full of islands.
Finally, to work as advertised the test requires that answers to the questions are uncorrelated, which is almost certainly not the case. So most people will find themselves with hundreds of "soulmates", a very few will have none. Unique matches will be extremely rare.
It's a superficially fun idea that turns out to be more of a monument to the failure to understand probability than anything else.
As you point out, too much similarity can adversely impact compatibility. Conversely, lack of similarity is often times a positive thing.
There is NO way that performance should be so bad given current load.
Some of the questions are frustrating. For instance question #4 is "YOU SAVE AN OLD LADY'S LIFE. IN GRATITUDE SHE GIVES YOU $100,000. WHAT DO YOU DO WITH MOST OF IT?" The obvious answer for me is, "Save it." But all possible answers are ways to spend it or give it away. I chose "Move to a nicer neighborhood", but that really is NOT who I am...
The site was on Reddit yesterday, now it's on the front page of HN. Maybe the author can't throw a lot of resources at it, or they used the project as an excuse to learn a new stack. Who knows.
Maybe it was slow for you. Maybe it's not a mathematically sound idea. Maybe the questions aren't ideal. The CAPTCHA isn't ideal.
Who cares? There's no need to be mean about it.
The idea of being 1 in 8x8 is a novel idea to me, but after reading a few comments here I found that it's not really sound.
One thing that really stands out to me that I haven't seen explicitly mentioned here is the fact that humans are not simply 8 dimensional. At a party, maybe sometimes I like to chill at the couch for a bit, then get to meet some new people, exchange some numbers, meet up with friends, etc...
And the same goes for any other question. $100k can go a long way, but I'd like to save some, spend some, donate some, etc.
Like I said, I like the idea of the project, but the idea that any open-ended question can have only 8 unique answers is not so sound.
> By [gratuitous negativity] we mean negativity that adds nothing of substance to a comment.
I would say that what I've seen here tends to be constructive. Even the criticisms of speed are not gratuitous - they're about an important issue affecting the site.
I do see some comments that are needlessly negative, so props for the reminder, but I wouldn't call it "an awful lot".
There isn't much negativity above your comment, no-one above you has criticized the speed or the CAPTCHA. Were you referring to a specific comment without using the reply-to feature? Are you saying the HN community is "mean" about it?
Most people on HN are very positive even if the project is slow, because everyone knows what it means to be on the top page of HN.
In other words, please hellban me now, because I didn't get what was negative in my first comment.
I don't have any power to hellban you!
On OKCupid, There are thousands of questions, many of them penned by users. You choose which questions to answer, then mark how important this question is to you. You also choose the answer you want your partner to have. For example:
Are you looking for a partner to have children with? [] yes [] no
Answer(s) you’ll accept [] yes [] no
Importance [] a little [] somewhat [] very
If this question were not at all important to you, you would just not answer it.
I think of it as an interesting experiment - even if nothing ends up coming from it.
My largest concern is there are about 3 questions where I was torn between two answers. I'm thinking I should create email addresses to "cover every base" by alternating my answers on those 3 questions in every permutation. On the other hand, I would feel a bit bad for using up some of the "freebies" that legitimate people might miss out on and have to pay the small fee.
@ColinWright
>8^8 should be thought of less as a scientific black box, but as a friend who claims to know someone you'll hit it off with, and wants the two of you to get together. It might be wrong, but it could very well be right.
I wonder what the legality of publishing their questions and answers are. If we can duplicate their questions and answers, people could find each other on twitter with a hashtag: #my8x8is{answer 1}{answer 2}...{answer 2}
If they have taken the 8x8 test to know their answers, they may as well enter an email address to be alerted when they have a match. Rather than checking Twitter, seeing as 8x8 already plans to email you if you have a match.
In theory if two Twitter users took the test and were a match - there would be no need to use a hashtag to tweet.
This could be useful if enough people participated and were interested in finding an "8x7" or even "8x6" match by changing their answer of two questions. But even then, you would need enough participants who use Twitter and are willing to tweet their answers.
It's 24 bits, so how about six hex digits, like HTML colour codes?
From the errors returned I'm pretty sure it's a PHP backend. Considering the expertise of the average PHP developer I don't think I need to say more (this might sound mean but it's not).
And they at the bottom say 11k matches so far... too bad I like the premise!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
If you're vague enough, everyone is self-centred enough to believe that you're talking about them.
I would expect the distribution of the answers to be close to uniform too.
To prevent abuse, we need to ensure that
everyone taking the 8^8 test is a human
and not a bot. Click on all of the icons
below that represent animals.
Good one.
Don't get me wrong, it's a cute idea, although I have to say that I'm not sure I'd get along with someone who thinks exactly as I do.
Edit: I've passed the spam test and started the "test" - most of the answers are "none of the above" or "any one of these 4". The usual frustrating experience. I mean:
THE KEY TO BEING SUCCESSFUL IN LIFE IS ...
It sounds like a neat idea but it's taking too long to load for me to check it out. I'll try again later.
The second, I think, can be ignored for now. The first is fairly unlikely, given the current popularity of the site and what a spammer stands to gain (hm, maybe there is quite somewhat to gain. One could register a few million different fake profiles, and use them to find gullible clients for a "I would like to come and visit you, but need money for the trip" scam. Edit: maybe, this whole site is part of such a scam)
Also, if I were to make my bot aware of this "I'm human" test, I also would program in knowledge of the URLs or the pixels of the pictures used, and get a 100% success rate.
Whether I click on just the animals or all three of them is part of the test, right?
Oh, apparently I have to actually be remotely ok in social settings. Seriously, what the fuck.
The point is that, like many polls, the questions are very leading, and take a distinctly biased approach. For example, the question about what to take away that would change who you are. The options are all very idealized, and sound like they come off a dating website (ok..., maybe that what this intends to be.) Almost none of the possible answers seem likely to be an answer in keeping with the "being honest" directive. If the question was more of "what is your idealized opinion of yourself" it might have a real answer.
To assemble an effective RPG party, you need multiple roles, like warrior, wizard, cleric, and rogue. Effective RL social circles work the same way. I'm more of an interjecting quipsniper or a technical sidebarbarian, and I really rely on other people to carry the majority of a conversation. If I were to hang out with a copy of myself, there would be no conversation to add zingers, counterpoints, and trivia to.
There's only so much of that crap that other people can take before it gets annoying, so there's not much use in adding two to the same party, unless they're scripted, like Crow and Tom Servo.
Also, I have a theory of conversation that keys on conversational coefficients. If a group of people are having a conversation, you add together their coefficients. If the sum is one, you have a very natural, comfortable conversation. If it is less than one, you experience some uncomfortable lulls. If it is greater than one, some people get interrupted, can't finish sharing their thoughts, or are excluded. If the coefficient approaches two, separate simultaneous threads of conversation will form, and participants will spontaneously rearrange or split themselves between conversations so as to make each one have a coefficient sum as close to one as is possible.
People don't have a fixed coefficient. They can adjust it within a certain range, that is somewhat dependent on atmosphere and subject matter. For instance, a lecturer who can teach an entire class without losing the attention of the audience can stretch up to 1.0 for conversations, but probably only for that one topic. Someone who has trouble yielding conversational priority may have a lower limit somewhere above 0.5. I suspect that most people can easily handle a range from 0.2 to 0.5. But I max out at probably a 0.4, on very few topics, so my "soul mate" would need to be much more talkative than I am, not at the same level, because it would take at least three of me to have a good conversation.
You find someone, and then work your guts out to be lovable and to love, and you become soulmates.
Here is an alternative algorithm: spend some effort finding a good enough partner, and at least as much effort building a good relationship with him or her.
I like this site: it shows the widespread idea in its purest form. Kind of a reductio ad absurdum.
URL Category: "Malicious Outbound Data/Botnets"
--------
I'm usually pretty pessimistic about the motives of websites like these. For example, this site seems like a great way to get a huge database of marketing info associated with email addresses. Nowhere on the main page or in their faq does it say they won't be selling this data, so they probably will. Use your spam-address if you're going to do this!
That being said, someone just like me also wouldn't pay for a service that's likely going to sign them up for spam. Given that payment will be required long before the odds favour a match for me showing up, I think I'll just skip it.
Actually there is a plane and a snowflake which share this property with the animals. But the set of images seems to be small - I got quite a few repetitions with just a few retries, so you could probably just hardcode it.
Which doesn't matter much - my feeling is that this test is rather intended to put humans into the right mood than to really deter bots.
I know it sounds dumb, but I think of myself as being a rather odd person, and not just like, collecting human skulls odd. It's hard to explain, but I don't feel that most people would get me, or like me once they got to know me. I'd love to find someone who's just like me (sometimes), so when I first clicked, I was a little excited, perhaps naively so. I was disappointed to find that it was just eight multiple-choice questions, many of which I had a hard time answering. There was no nuance.
There are also plenty of people that only care about a few things important to them, and don't care much about extra oddities.
If you care about the feelings of someone, and you like them, that goes a long way towards them liking you. If you are non-judgemental about the oddities of others, that helps a lot too.
Of course that assumes that the person even consciously knows what they want. I don't know how true that is.
But, as others already pointed out, there are some problems with the current version:
* one could prefer multiple answers on some questions. I think that the test should allow for multiple answers and use ML/statistics to find close/closest matches. Using True/False (exact match) may not be the best. The "workaroud" would be to take several tests with all the permutations, but IMO that is a design flaw.
* the questions may not be the best. This is an interesting problem - how can we pick questions/attributes that would be a good "model" of human personality/mind/psychology?
* such test need to reach a lot of people and it may take a long time. Therefore, it needs to be done _right_ from the beginning, so that all the people take the same test.
Again - I love the concept and I'm glad that somebody it taking the time and effort to build this. IMO this has the potential to influence who you spend your time/life with - so it's very important to do this well.
It generates a random number, then tries 8^8 times to generate a new random number and find a match.
1) You either do or don't get along with certain people.
2) This is determined by how they act, look and your dispositions to those actions and looks.
3) Given these terms for quantifying the amount of 'like' you feel towards a person, it follows that there are combinations of act/look that you absolutely loathe or love.
4) There exists a combination of act/look that is your perfect match, the combination that you love the most, ie. Your soulmate.
What does not follow is that you would like someone who, as the site puts it, is very much like you. I'm quite sure I couldn't stand myself in certain situations. Maybe your soulmate is actually someone who is entirely unlike you in certain aspects?
EDIT:
Also it's likely, at least in my case, that some of the questions don't have the options you'd pick. I guess it kinda proves that 8 options over 8 questions can't be used to arbitrarily identity a person.
I suspect you're much more likely to find a good romantic partner by spending more quality time with people you initially like and find attractive, rather than spending all your effort trying to meet as many different people as possible.
Where do we disagree?
I liked this until they said "soulmate" it works much better as a weird sort of atsy project.
"Psychology is a science" - Anyone following Retractation Watch may beg to differ...
"8^8 is blocked outside of countries where English is both the official language and the most common vernacular." - Could take it from France, no VPN involved...
Pay my debts.
The answers to the "greatest satisfaction" question are also telling. They are all job/business related. There's not even a single "spend time with my friends and family" catch-all.
Sigh
We'll never find each other unless s/he wanders into an internet cafe tomorrow before this rolls off of front page of HN...
Hurry soul mate! HURRY down the mountain!
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/29/pf/debt-collections/
So yes, "Pay off debts" is plenty sane, and yet not on there. And given the existing potential answers, gives credence that this is for rich white boys financed by rich mommy and daddy.
Question 1: "AT A PARTY YOU..." Missing answer: "I don't go to parties".
The same applies to most of them. It seems like the author got some friends to write down possible answer, but didn't assume that there are people way more different than themselves. I can't answer honestly to most of them, so I can see how it'll fail horrible to find someone else like myself.
Complements: for many traits, I prefer someone who has a strength where I have a weakness. I like opposing opinions as they help me work out my wrongnesses.
Will we get that many people to take the quiz? I guess time will tell.
#2 "REMOVING WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WOULD MAKE YOU A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSON?"
I'm not a native speaker -- what am I supposed to do here?