[owenlacey]

Thank you! This is consistent with feedback I got from the pudding, and is ultimately the reason they didn't go ahead with the post. I tried reverse-engineering the information-theory approach to try see what sort of decisions it made.

I noticed that for any match up score of X, the following match up would keep exactly X pairs in common. So if they scored 4/10 one week, they would change 6 couples before the next one. Employing that approach alone performed worse than the contestants did in real life, so didn't think it was worth mentioning!

[vitus]

It should be easier to understand the optimal truth booth strategy. Since this is a yes/no type of question, the maximum entropy is 1 bit, as noted by yourself and others. As such, you want to pick a pair where the odds are as close to 50/50 as possible.

> Employing that approach alone performed worse than the contestants did in real life, so didn't think it was worth mentioning!

Yeah, this alone should not be sufficient. At the extreme of getting a score of 0, you also need the constraint that you're not repeating known-bad pairs. The same applies for pairs ruled out (or in!) from truth booths.

Further, if your score goes down, you need to use that as a signal that one (or more) of the pairs you swapped out was actually correct, and you need to cycle those back in.

I don't know what a human approximation of the entropy-minimization approach looks like in full. Good luck!

[CmdDot]

«As such, you want to pick a pair where the odds are as close to 50/50 as possible.»

This is incorrect, the correct strategy is mostly to check the most probable match (the exception being if the people in that match has less possible pairings remaining than the next most probable match).

The value of confirming a match, and thus eliminate all other pairings involving those two from the search space, is much higher than a 50/50 chance of getting a no match and only excluding that single pairing.