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DFS date preparation

Posted by Simon Welsh | 2 July 2010 | Comments (5)

Yay for graph theory :)

Source: xkcd

Alt-text: 

"A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other."

Well, that was handy. I just pasted that it it got all nicely formatted :)


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  • Pfft, dating.

    Posted by Caitlin, 14/08/2012 12:02pm (3 years ago)

  • I suppose that blind dating is kinda doing a BFS. And maybe the each node has each possible next date as children node, but you can prune the graph based on what you know about the person? That way if some date doesn't work, you can backtrack and try another method.

    This is making me think that dating is a bit more complicated than most graphs.

    Posted by Simon Welsh, 04/07/2010 2:12pm (5 years ago)

  • Hmm, so the each node (other than the root node) only has one child node? That is to say, the 'nth date with girl x' has only the child '(n+1)th date with girl x', or no children in the case of the final date? I suspect some girls would object to breadth-first search.

    Posted by qwandor, 03/07/2010 10:18am (5 years ago)

  • I was thinking the search was done with each date being a node. So a DFS would date a single person until you've had every date with them, then go to your second person.

    Having a heuristic in the process would be better. Though how do you define your end point?

    Posted by Simon Welsh, 03/07/2010 9:36am (5 years ago)

  • Surely a best-first search would be the way to go, maybe A* or something.

    Though wait a minute, what does a depth-first search mean anyway? Dating the first girl you meet, then her first friend, and so on until you get to a girl with no friends at which point you backtrack?

    Posted by qwandor, 03/07/2010 7:24am (5 years ago)

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