
Solving the Dating Problem with the SENPAI Protocol [pdf] - obi1kenobi
http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/veryconference-paper10.pdf
======
s_m_t
This already exists, it is called flirting.

Given two socially well adjusted participants it allows either party to back
down without hurting the other parties feelings and allows everyone to save
face. The person escalating the flirtation doesn't feel bad because they
aren't outright denied and the respondee isn't put in the awkward situation of
having to deny someone.

It also has the added benefit of allowing each person to get to know each
other better and figure out if they actually have real 'chemistry' to begin
with. Furthermore, attraction isn't binary, you might initially start chatting
with someone with the intention of escalating the flirting process but figure
out, hey, I just want to be friends with this person! With the SENPAI protocol
you might just end up in an ill fated relationship with your would be friend

~~~
flukus
Flirting has a high signal to noise ratio.

There are also many issues with unintentional signalling.

~~~
bbctol
Seems like the sort of problem a deep neural network would be great for. I've
already got some good hardware for it, but I'm a little apprehensive about
acquiring enough training examples.

~~~
seangrogg
Just put together a research pool so you can generate a solid baseline. I'm
sure you could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to get a large number of able
participants at minimal cost to your wallet and pride.

------
Kalium
> In his presentation of the original protocol, Aaronson suggests that zero-
> knowledge proofs can be used to prevent cheating. However, we find this
> approach unsatisfying, partly because zero-knowledge proofs would make the
> protocol much more unwieldy and time-consuming, and partly because we have
> no clue how to actually implement ZKP in this context

I am in love with the honesty in this.

~~~
mrob
ZKP is also useless in this case because there's no way to enforce dating if
the ZKP finds a match. Anybody who wants to detect a crush can simply lie
about having one themself.

~~~
gizmo686
Except the presented protocol already does not prevent this attack (which they
acknowledge in the paper).

ZKP still provides the property that cheating will be detected, which is all
that is required to satisfy the papers security definition.

------
GuiA
For those not getting the reference, "senpai" is a Japanese honorific used to
address one's upper classman in school.

A common trope in Japanese medium is that a character will have a crush on a
senpai (equivalent to a prefect or hall monitor in that context), only for
them to be utterly oblivious to it.

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SempaiKohai](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SempaiKohai)

This is a witty paper, as other commenters are noting.

~~~
astrobe_
I think you see that trope mainly in hentais and very rarely in regular
romcoms, as far as animes go.

~~~
sotojuan
That's not true. I've stopped watching seasonal anime but the last time I did
(2014), every single comedy/romance anime had that trope. Sometimes it's just
admiration and not romance but it seems to always be there.

~~~
astrobe_
It's _most of the times_ admiration and not romance, and is most of the times
a comedy element and not part of the main plot. That's very different from
what OP stated.

------
NeutronBoy
> Unfortunately, this protocol is completely dependent on the trustworthiness
> of Trent, as they receive all of Alice and Bob’s information and are
> entirely free to manipulate the results of the protocol. If Trent has been
> compromised, perhaps by a nation-state adversary, Alice and Bob’s love life
> will be completely in the hands of a malicious attacker

Beautifully done.

~~~
peterburkimsher
"nation-state adversary" and "logical AND" both cracked me up. It is
surprising to see common themes with my own research on this topic: "thinking
too much".

------
akanet
This whole paper was great. It starts heavy on the humor but then also
delivers just enough actual cryptographic protocol to make the lead-up worth
it. This bit at the end was my favorite:

    
    
      As is noted in [1], if Alice simply suggests to Bob that
      they carry out a SENPAI exchange, this in and of itself is
      indicative of interest on Alice’s part. Thus, the only nonawkward
      way to actually use the SENPAI protocol is to
      assemble large groups of people, and have every pair of
      people carry out the protocol.

~~~
iraphael
I'm interested in the consequences of, instead of "everyone" carrying out
SENPAI, having a more efficient STB Matching System (Spin The Bottle).

Sure, it could backfire: interested parties may fall victims of the universe's
Random Number Generator, but it makes for some interesting Game Theory
dynamics, which I call the Tinder Card Stack Dilemma.

Any one party could be more willing to express interest in any of the other
parties (assigned by STB), if they believe there is a low chance of them being
matched with someone else they are more interested in.

On the other hand, they could become more picky, and only express interest in
parties they are very interested in, rejecting others because they believe
there is a high chance of them being matched with greater interests.

There is a definite trade off between efficiency and overall population
happiness when choosing between STB and the solution described in the paper.
Because STB is more efficient, it ends up being way more scale-able. But
bigger populations greatly intensify the TCSD.

------
abetusk
TLDR; (fta)

    
    
        Alice and Bob should each
        learn the logical AND of their
        responses, and nobody should
        learn any other information
    

The SENPAI protocol is proposing a way to do this with cryptography. There's a
historical review of other proposed protocols (AMP, JMAP, MFP, SOAP, YGMP,
SLP) along with their deficiencies. A SENPAI-MTT protocol is also considered
that allows for non-binary interest (MTT=More Than Two). They propose foiling
protocol cracking by quantum factoring by basing future SENPAI protocols on
lattice based cryptographic methods.

------
dlgeek
The entire site hosting this is hilarious - it appears to be an April Fools
parody of an academic tech conference and it's very well executed.

"Submissions are double blind and author names must be removed. On the
published copy, authors must be ordered by descending number of vowels."

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Thanks- I initially thought this was hosted on arxiv (it's on a MIT server).

This paper from the same conference also looks good:

[http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/veryconference-
paper5.pdf](http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/veryconference-paper5.pdf)

"Locally Bijective, Non-Noetherian, Ultra-Liouville Random Variables and
Parabolic Lie Theory"

"Good" as in "it was probably generated by an LSTM RNN".

Full papers listing here:

[http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/](http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/)

And main conference page:

[http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/](http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/)

For the benefit of other July fools like me :0

P.S.

This one is of special interest to me: Evident Logic, a logic programming
language based on a new logic, made special by "not the rules that it has, but
the rules it lacks, so we wish the reader good luck in figuring that out":

[http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/veryconference-
paper8.pdf](http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/veryconference-paper8.pdf)

------
peteretep
Tangential: can somebody explain to me how same-sex speed-dating is sequenced?
Two-sex is easy as one sex remains static while the other rotates around, but
I can't figure out a solution for single-sex.

Update: a solution that satisfies being practical to organise and that lets
you talk to all participants

Update2: [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/55439/gay-speed-
dati...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/55439/gay-speed-dating-
problem)

~~~
waqf
I don't know how they actually do it, but this would work:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_factorization#Complete_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_factorization#Complete_graphs)

~~~
peteretep
This way you see everyone, but have a logistical nightmare.

~~~
wiml
All you need to do is set it to music, so that at the end of the set each
1-factor of the factorization has been represented for a verse. You'd probably
need a distinct song and pattern for each group size.

If your dancers are some mixture of male/female/het/homo/bi such that you
don't have a complete graph or other easy problem then you may need to have a
computer-augmented dance caller.

------
yongjik
> The Just Man Up And Ask Protocol (JMAP) is often proposed as a naive
> solution to the Dating Problem...

Man, this paper is golden!

------
rhyzomatic
Super fun paper.

It seems like their modification to Aaronson's algorithm would also work for
Yao's garbled circuits, i.e.

1\. Alice generates a long random bitstring s, and publishes hash(s)

2\. Alice crafts a garbled circuit with just one AND gate, where the false
output is 0+s, and the true output is 1. Alice sends the circuit and her input
to Bob.

3\. Bob gets his input from Alice using oblivious transfer. He evaluates the
circuit, publishing the result.

4\. If the result starts with 0, Bob verifies that hash of the rest of the
string matches the hash published by Alice. Alice also checks to make sure the
rest of the string matches her original s.

------
Ar-Curunir
If you want to use heavy handed crypto you can utilise multiparty computation
protocols that are secure against malicious parties.

For the 2PC case this problem was solved way back in the 1980s Andrew Yao.

------
peterburkimsher
The paper is very helpful for the arbitration of a "simple, binary
phenomenon". Section 4.1 correctly investigates ternary responses.

However, logic may only be used if a common GND is accepted. If Alice does not
believe in absolute truth, there is no way that trust can be established.
Analogue systems may not approach 1, only digital logic can provide "TRUE"
love.

Moral relativism is commonly professed. However, I theorise that an absolute 0
point can be readily established.

"Is cheating in relationships always wrong?"

If a common GND cannot be established this way, then the crush may be ended
without wasting more time running the simulation.

------
IshKebab
This has already existed for ages using trusted third parties. A while ago on
Facebook there were things were you could say which of your friends you fancy,
and if you match it sends you both a message.

The problem is there's no real disincentive just to say 'yes' to everyone,
just to see who said yes back. Kind of like always swiping right on Tinder
(although I'm sure they punish you for that in some way).

------
GrumpyNl
While reading i had to scratch my head and ask myself, is this serious or is
someone pulling my leg.

~~~
obi1kenobi
The paper was submitted to SIGTBD 2016. From the website
([http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/](http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/)):

SIGTBD's emphases includes innovative, elegant (to the point of simplicity)
and creative approaches for solving problems that are not traditionally served
by the academic community. These problem spaces may be obsolete or unrealistic
even by academic standards and are often of debatable research taste.

~~~
GrumpyNl
dlgeek 7 hours ago [-]

The entire site hosting this is hilarious - it appears to be an April Fools
parody of an academic tech conference and it's very well executed.
"Submissions are double blind and author names must be removed. On the
published copy, authors must be ordered by descending number of vowels." reply

------
nialv7
Uhm, how do one compute the cubic root of x^3 modulo N?

------
usmannk
Is the protocol described in Aaronson's algorithm actually sound? I can't seem
to make sense of it myself. An example sequence would help.

------
zardeh
I'm curious what happened to paper number 6

~~~
zentiggr
"There is no paper number six!"

------
samfisher83
Who is the Author of the paper? Usually people put that at the top.

~~~
michaelmior
This is a preprint from a conference with a double blind submission process,
which is why the author names are not present. According to the agenda the
authors are S. Dukhovni, J. Weisblat, and I. Chung.

~~~
samfisher83
I can't find these people using google.

~~~
oceliker
They are undergraduates at the EECS department.

------
qwertyuiop924
First the underwear sorting hat, and now this.

MIT, never change.

------
mickdj
[10] is the best

------
kazinator
先輩のが多きくて硬い。 カッコいい！

~~~
larvyde
Use 大きくて, not 多きくて

the former is 'big', the latter is 'many'

~~~
kazinator
You have to watch that Windows IME like a hawk.

------
whatismybrowser
"Notice me SENPAI!"

------
JacksonGariety
There is a dating problem?

~~~
woliveirajr
I thought Tinder had it solved...

~~~
dripton
Tinder is Trent in this protocol. As long as both Alice and Bob trust Trent,
that works. But Trent can cheat.

~~~
Kalium
And then the Russians might control our love lives!

~~~
flukus
I'm prepared to give them a go at this point, they can't do a worse job of it
than me.

