【纽约客】在线相亲：人海中寻找你.doc

【纽约客】在线相亲：人海中寻找你 译者： aisen 原作者：Nick Paumgarten 发表时间：2011-07-25浏览量：19425评论数：12挑错数：0 互联网上的欲望、爱情和寂寞。机缘中翻译了如此一篇文章，让我对相亲网站有了新的认识，读一读也许你也有新的看法。 In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service. 在1964年的秋天，25岁的会计师路易斯·阿费斯在皇后区参观世博会时，偶然看到了派克笔展馆的露天展示，那里有一台巨型计算机正在为好奇的展馆参观者们选择外国笔友。你填写一份答卷，送入机器中，然后几乎马上就会收到一张卡片，卡片上有远方志同道合的参与者们的名字和住址——你们的理想相互匹配。阿费斯觉得这个非常妙。他打电话告诉了自己在IBM当程序员的朋友罗伯特·罗斯，之后他们开始考虑如何调整这种寻找配对者的方式更贴近家用。他们听说一些哈佛的学生因为一个叫作配对运算的程序而出名，这个程序用电脑为人们相亲。一年以后，阿费斯和罗斯拥有了被他们称为TACT项目的原型机——技术自动化相容性测试的简称——纽约市第一个电脑相亲服务。 Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred multiple-choice questions. One section asked subjects to choose from a list of “dislikes”: “1. Affected people. 2. Birth control. 3. Foreigners. 4. Free love. 5. Homosexuals. 6. Interracial marriage,” and so on. Another question, in a section called “Philosophy of Life Values,” read, “Had I the ability I would most like to do the work of (choose two): (1) Schweitzer. (2) Einstein. (3) Picasso.” Some of the questions were gender-specific. Men were asked to rank drawings of women’s hair s