SSR Confidential assignments are out!

[sholio]

Even earlier than expected. :) For the most part, it was an unusually smooth matching process this year (helped vastly by one person being a total MVP for letting me game their signup to make the matches work better; THANK YOU). I also learned that if you run the matching algorithm multiple times, you actually get different matches even if you don't change anything, which is weird and counterintuitive, but I got better matches the second time than the first, so ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, if you have a problem with your assignment, please go ahead and contact me. Otherwise, you can follow ssrconfidential/ssrconfidential for games, discussion posts, help with prompts/brainstorming, and other fun stuff during the creation period.

Comments

tangent

[yhlee]

I don't know what AO3's matching algorithm is and I don't know what Festivids is using these days, but if the former is anything like the original Festivids matching code (provided by a generous but anonymous Festivids Elf), the algorithm determines certain things pseudorandomly. I had a ton of fun during the first Festivids just running the algorithm on my laptop for the hell of it and watching all the different matches that fell out. :p

Re: tangent

[sholio]

Ahhh, that makes sense! I had assumed it was completely deterministic, but I guess if it had to examine EVERY match, there would be a virtually infinite number of them and it would take several thousand years to match an exchange. XD Including a random-ish element (to, I guess, effectively say "this is good enough") makes a lot of sense!

[sheron]

I would imagine there are probably a lot of 'equivalent' matches (i.e. where matching person A with either B or C makes sense, algorithmically), and the algorithm just picks randomly whom to match first or something, which would result in different match ups every time, assuming different match ups are possible. (I don't know anything about the exact thing it does though... but yhlee's comment makes a lot of sense)

[kore]

Ooh, and a letters post soon please? (Don't mean to nag!)