It's just impossible to ignore and not construct a model for this place, a dating website. Based on a number of very simple assumptions, some very interesting results come up. You don't even need to know any math for this, or physics.
Here's some music so you don't get bored:
So, the assumptions are:
1. A (conventional) dating website is where we have 2 groups of 2 kinds of people (females and males) who wish to find themselves a match, one person of the opposite group.
2. The matching goes by communication between people there, whether through "letters" or instant messaging (or any other kind the website comes up with, with a sophisticated system of limitations that strikes the balance between not making the users give up and make as many as possible pay money to remove limitations).
3a. No member of either group can see what the others are doing.
3b. No member can see the profiles of other members of his own group or see what they do.
3c. Every member can see ALL the profiles of the opposite group's members.
4. It's a general rule that websites have about 5 to 10 times more males than females.
5. People are characterized by profiles, which they compose themselves: text (hobbies, etc.), parameters, pictures.
6. People can be rated on a linear scale of "desiredness". Yes one might say that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", and that for every person there are different things which are important in the partner, but I say - if 100 girls are presented with a lineup of 10 guys and asked to sort them from "worst" to "best" given the parameters which are commonly displayed on website "profiles", the order in will be almost same for each girl, and averaged on 100 girls it will be almost the same.
What I assume is that one can take all the guys' profiles and sort them on a scale, see image. Lotta average guys, a small number of undesired ones, and a very very small number of most desired guys (or girls). I assume that this "distribution" (histogram) is same for both groups.
Let the games begin
Usually websites should have hundreds of people in each group, otherwise due to lack of diversity people would just leave. So we'll scale down the problem; suppose we have 100 guys, 10 girls, and later we will multiply the relevant results by 10.
Assumption (2) says we need communication for matching, so someone has to initiate. The guys usually do that, so the other group just sits there and waits for the messages to come in.
Because of (3a,b,c), every guy who comes to the website sees the diversity and "hell, why not" sends messages only to the best girls there (in our miniature example, they are three).
Results at opening:
R1: 300 letters have been sent, only to 3 girls.
R2: Each of the 3 girls got 100 letters!
In a real website every "desired" girl (high scale position) will eventually get about 1000 letters, one per almost every guy.
It is clear that one girl can't read so many (unless really lifeless and bored) so she has to ignore many letters and maybe go through them later. Suppose she reads 10 letters per day.
R3: You are not likely to get an answer fast, even if you're the best guy around.
Another thing is that each girl will be choosing the best guys to communicate with (suppose, five at a time), therefore 95 guys will be disappointed. For now, at least. Consider this, - even if the girls there are very polite, they just can't sit down and compose each guy a proper refusal letter. And shouldn't either; leaving things unanswered makes them open for developments later.
R4: If you don't have a very impressive profile, there's a very high chance your letter will be ignored.
So driven by assumptions (1) and (2), guys who were ignored go on and try with other girls. For every guy, this "creep" continues either until he gets enough chances for date or until he refuses to go any "lower" and quits. A realistic website has of course new people coming (depends on its popularity) which keep guys trying again with new girls, but it doesn't change the model; it's just the above picture repeating itself.This model can be elaborated further, taking the "fresh meat" into account, and predicting the creep of guys to turn to the less-wanted girls. Also the creep of girls to read letters of less desired guys, which is couterbalanced by fresh guys who come to the website; it's always more attractive to read new mail rather than go dig in old letters.
Eventually if the model is correctly put in numbers, its time development should show the following - how many letters F a person gets from each type of people in the other group (scaled at y), depending on his scale position x. In other words - "who you see in the other group from your scale position", as function of time: F(x,y,t).
For example. at start of the game we said that all the 100 guys "look" at the 3 girls (95 remain in the dark), so the other 7 girls "see" nobody. But that doesn't last long because the 95 ignored guys have finite patience so they creep down the girls' scale. One should remember that there's 10 guys per girl at the website, so just imagine the outcome.
I quit, after 1 month. It's common there for people to lie, put up old pictures, write false information and conceal important facts. They just sell. Don't know about guys, but girls - if they have anything good about them, it's there on display, sometimes quite shamelessly.
I feel kind of uncomfortable about showing off my sixpack, car, guitar or anything else. Let it all be for the next one I'll meet on my trek.
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