More on Gale-Shapley

Most human males make a significant contribution of resources to a single partner. This is true in my family anyhow, and though I would say I may have some of the attributes that would enable me to be a Lothario, I don't feel the propensity for that lifestyle.

Yet, like other species, males pursue and women select. I have never been asked out in my life. Occasionally women seem to be trying particularly hard to make themselves available for me to pursue, but sometimes I encounter men who seem to be doing the same thing.

I find it equally unsettling in either case.

So this raises the problem of finding an optimum partnership. Men too, given that they will only pass on their genetics a few times, must select partnerships with the highest possible fitness. How do they achieve this when they generally don't do any selection at all.

Well they have to use an algorithm to select WHO they pursue. This has been roughly defined as the Gale-Shapley algorithm.

From Wiki:
The Gale-Shapley algorithm involves a number of "rounds" (or "iterations") where each unengaged man "proposes" to the most-preferred woman to whom he has not yet proposed, and she accepts or rejects him based on whether she is already engaged to someone she prefers. If she is unengaged, or engaged to a man lower down her preference list than her new suitor, she accepts the proposal (and in the latter case, the other man becomes unengaged again). Note that only women can switch partners to increase their happiness.

This is the ideal way to produce stable marriages for every member of a population.

But why does this mean men need closure? More later.

Ma jack

Spencer

My dog

Here he is
Spencer

Friggin toys

I have owned:

1. A TI-85 programable calculator
   
2. A PalmPilot Personal
3. An Asus PDA
4. A Sharp Zaurus CL-3200 clamshell PDA

Now, I have just acquired a Blackberry Curve 8310. With all of the above I was ultimately disappointed. They were all supposed to be the pocket-able computer that would help me get my life together. With each I eventually realized that I just needed to get my life together, and a fucking toy wasn't gonna do it.

However, with my Blackberry, I'm still in the honeymoon phase. I'm paying $40 for unlimited internet access and 1000 text messages, but it has been incredibly useful in the past few days I've had it.

Example:
I was at the carwash with my mother, just waiting, and she was saying the she was telling someone about this fish in the Amazon river that tries to swim up into you when you pee. The person she was talking to was sure this was a myth. Well, within a minute I was reading to her about the candiru fish.

Okay, that sounds trivial. Anyway, I still like this thing.

Closure

Last month I dated a very beautiful woman, and I quickly and foolishly became enamored with her. Before we even started dating, she made it clear that she was unlikely to continue living in southern California, because she was pursuing work elsewhere.

Even so, when she told me that she had a job offer, and she that was leaving, I was crushed. I really couldn't figure out why. I had low expectations for the relationship. After our last date I sent her quite a few emails, trying to probe her to see what was on her mind, and she never responded. That hurt me even more.

I have come to realize why I have been unhappy with this outcome. What I wanted was closure.

So I asked myself, why do people want closure?

In non-romantic relationships you don't really need closure. At least I don't. But in this case, I knew a girl for two weeks, and now I've spent four weeks thinking about her. The human mind is an efficient instrument when it comes to matters of self-propagation (some people call this romance, love, courtship.)

So, I decided to research the subject. Why spend so much energy examining relationships that have ended?

I think I found a big piece of the answer, or at least a useful abstraction of the problem. It is the stable marriage problem. The solution is our brains version of the Gale-Shapley algorithm. This is a subject I'm going to be exploring in coming posts.