Editing 770: All the Girls
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
| Latest revision | Your text | ||
| Line 12: | Line 12: | ||
In the title text, written in Cueball's voice, we have another compliment/qualifier pair. Cueball assures Megan that he'll never leave her—so long as some other girl is with someone. Cueball clearly has an unrequited love for another, and so really is being as unreliable and selfish as he initially appeared. | In the title text, written in Cueball's voice, we have another compliment/qualifier pair. Cueball assures Megan that he'll never leave her—so long as some other girl is with someone. Cueball clearly has an unrequited love for another, and so really is being as unreliable and selfish as he initially appeared. | ||
| − | This comic is related with {{w|stable marriage problem}}, which is usually stated as: Given ''n'' men and ''n'' women, can they all be married off in such a way that there is no possible "adulterous" pairing that both the man and woman would prefer over their current partner? It turns out the answer is yes, and there are even algorithms that can be used to find such a set of marriages. However, such algorithms don't usually give people their first choice, just their first choice among potential partners who prefer them to all the alternatives. The algorithms also favor either the men or the women, so one side will typically get closer to their ideal preferences than the other. Such algorithms do get used in situations like assigning medical students to residencies (technically it's a polygamous generalization, but it's basically the same idea), in which case it's biased in favor of the medical students. | + | This comic is related with {{w|stable marriage problem}}, which is usually stated as: Given ''n'' men and ''n'' women, can they all be married off in such a way that there is no possible "adulterous" pairing that both the man and woman would prefer over their current partner? It turns out the answer is yes, and there are even algorithms that can be used to find such a set of marriages. However, such algorithms don't usually give people their first choice, just their first choice among potential partners who prefer them to all the alternatives. The algorithms also favor either the men or the women, so one side will typically get closer to their ideal preferences than the other. Such algorithms do get in used in situations like assigning medical students to residencies (technically it's a polygamous generalization, but it's basically the same idea), in which case it's biased in favor of the medical students. |
In the comic [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] could be a couple arranged through a stable marriage algorithm. In most cases that would mean that they both have potential partners that they would prefer over the one they're with, and the only reason that they aren't with that person is that their love was unrequited. That leaves both of them with a certain amount of emotional baggage that most people would consider detrimental to stable marriage. In short, while a stable marriage algorithm may provide good solutions to certain matching problems, it may not be the best way to produce actual stable marriages. | In the comic [[Cueball]] and [[Megan]] could be a couple arranged through a stable marriage algorithm. In most cases that would mean that they both have potential partners that they would prefer over the one they're with, and the only reason that they aren't with that person is that their love was unrequited. That leaves both of them with a certain amount of emotional baggage that most people would consider detrimental to stable marriage. In short, while a stable marriage algorithm may provide good solutions to certain matching problems, it may not be the best way to produce actual stable marriages. | ||
