... while at the same time probably not being shallow enough.
A Slashdot item links to this bit about the proposed use of artificial intelligence to judge reciprocal attractiveness in the context of computer dating services (as I so quaintly call them).
(A quick scan of the paper suggests that it's really using social networking as input, so the summary-of-a-summary at Slashdot suggested human-level shallowness that's maybe not there.)
But, if you're looking for hard-core attractiveness? Especially, whether a woman will be sexually attracted to a man? You're not going to find that in a dating profile nor a social network. You need pheromone samples.
But, I hear you say, only animals have pheromones! That doesn't apply to humans!
OK, so call it something else, then. And yet: smell plays a huge role in human mating, and it's not the one the perfume companies like to push. As fictionally noted in That-Idiot-Ivan's Alliance, it's how women identify prospective mates with complementary immune systems. (That's one notion, anyway. May or may not be right, but it seems to match the facts at hand.)
Evolution: it just keeps happening. Its mechanisms are subtle, and you never really evolve beyond them, even if your grandma was a genetically-engineered transhuman.
(And, just to complicate matters, a woman's taste in men's pheromones is inverted when she's pregnant or on the Pill. So there may be two questions: "Would she go for you now?" and "Would she go for you if she were/weren't on the Pill?")
Further: Be sure your proteins get along before you get too close.
Comments