Episode 7: On the Money

It’s too bad I’m not the one competing for a million bucks here, because I’ve got this bitch SOLVED!

Let me back up, though.

In tonight’s episode, nothing really amazing happened, except that Kayla started hitting herself (OMG MTV WTF). Ryan & Kayla got voted into the Truth Booth, which was a giant yawn for us because we have known for weeks that they can’t be a match.

Ceremony time and the matches were as follows:

We know that 3 of these are definitely correct, and 2 (John + Brittany and Joey + Jessica) are definitely wrong, because Joey + Brittany are a confirmed match via MTV hintage. That means that if my predictions after the last episode are correct, the group will get 7 matches correct this time.

And guess what? THEY GOT 7 CORRECT!

This basically confirms that I’m a genius and that my predictions are right. Boo-yah, or some such. But to go back to logical mathiness, since we know 3 of the 7, that means there are 4 correct matches left in the group, with only 5 possible matches to choose from. In other words, tonight’s 5 unsolved matches have an 80% chance of being correct. So our logic puzzle now looks like this:

It’s now overwhelmingly likely that Wes + Kayla, Adam + Shanley, and Dre + Simone are matches. Of the two possible matches left, 1 is correct, and I’m still sticking with Scali + Jacy.

Final lineup predictions, and I’d bet money on it at this point:

Boom! Where’s my money, MTV?

(and seriously, if MBA Wes does not bust out some kind of spreadsheet to try to figure this out in the next episode, I’m going to cry. Where did you go to school, dude? Or is MTV just not showing us that you’re, you know, competent?)

Episode 6….Continued

Blah blah drama, only interesting development in the second part of this episode is that Jacy & Scali have a developing attraction.

We finally get to see the matchup ceremony, which yields the following pairs:

5 lights go on, and obviously we know who 3 of those lights are for (and also 2 couples who they definitely aren’t for), so that leaves us 5 couples of which 2 are correct: Ryan & Jessica (ooh!), Wes & Kayla (duh), Adam & Ashley (nah), John & Jacy, and Dre & Shanley. Our 6 episode “logic puzzle” looks like this:

So since only 1 pair can be right out of the Episode 1, 2, and 3 matchups, and only 2 pair can be right out of episodes 5 and 6, I am feeling pretty comfortable predicting the entire lineup now.

We know 4 matches for sure:

Dillan + Coleysia, Chris T + Paige, Ethan + Amber and Joey + Brittany.

Based on this grid and what we’ve seen from the show, I’m going to go ahead and call the remaining 6 matches:

Wes + Kayla (the other 2 episode 1 possibilities make no sense), Adam + Shanley (ditto for episode 2), Dre + Simone (ditto for episode 4). Episode 5 only has 2 correct pairings left, and we’re already going with W+K and A+S, so that means John+Jacy as a pair are out, as are the remaining 2 episode 5 pairings. W+K transfers to episode 6 as one of the 2 correct pair, and we’ve already ruled out J+J, so of the three left the most likely pairing is Ryan + Jessica. That means Scali + Jacy could indeed be a match, as was strongly hinted at in this episode.

So we have Wes + Kayla, Adam + Shanley, Dre + Simone, Ryan + Jessica, and Scali + Jacy as solid predictions. The only thing is, that would mean John + Ashleigh are a match. We haven’t seen anything to suggest that, but we haven’t seen anything to rule it out, either. Time will tell.

Episode 6: Are they really still boning?

In spite of being told in the very first episode that they are NOT at match, Chris T and Shanley have continued to get it on, because they don’t care what anybody thinks, and their love is worth more than $50,000, you guys! The housemates are understandably pissed, with Simone leading the charge, because ain’t nobody getting in the way of her 50k.

The challenge involves eating various versions of nasty snowcones (fish juice with fish chunks, anyone?), and couples comprised of leftovers at the end of the 30-second musical chair-esque partner picking period wisely bow out early, leaving three legit possible couples (Chris T + Paige, Amber + Ethan, and Brittany + Joey) and one random pairing (Dre + Shanley – who probably just tried to win so she could go on the date to keep an eye on Chris) to potentially go into the Truth Booth.

In the aftermath of this, for the first time this season, we see the contestants address the fact that this is a logic puzzle game, and try to solve it. Jessica is shown making the case to send Ethan + Amber into the booth, because in episode 3 only 2 couples were correct at the match up, and Dillan + Coleysia have already been identified as a match. We know this logic because we did it last week, when Ethan + Amber were revealed to US as a match. But Simone makes an equally strong case for sending Chris T + Paige in: we know they’re a likely match because they’ve been paired more than once in final ceremonies with high probabilities, and if they ARE a match, it separates Shanley and Chris T and so that the group can figure out who Shanley’s match is faster. The contestants decide to go with the latter strategy, and send Chris T and Paige in….

PERFECT MATCH!

Shanley is beside herself, but we don’t care, because we just narrowed shit down a LOT farther. And as a side note, why are so many other girls (Jessica, Ashleigh) seemingly distraught over this? Do they just really not like conflict? No matter, we now have this:

So we have 4 couples matched, and our remaining 12 players are all down to 5 possible matches or less, with the exception of Ryan, Adam, and Shanley, who all still have 6 possible matches.

We also have this:

So we have 3 pools of 3 couples from previous episode matchup ceremonies, and we know that each pool contains 1 correct couple. We also have a pool of 5 from episode 5’s ceremonies that we know contains 2 correct couples. Look at this, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that Wes + Kayla is probably a match, but it gets tricky when you look at the the other likely couples: Jacy + John, Scali + Simone, and Adam + Shanley. All of these are repeated matchups, which increases their likelihood, but they can’t all be correct. Only one of the two between J+J and A+S can be correct, because they are both in the episode 2 pool and only one of those three is correct. And only two out of the four likely couples can be correct, since they are all in the episode 5 pool and we know that only two couples in that pool are correct.

I was looking forward to the additional info we’d get from tonight’s matchup ceremony when MTV decided to go all old-school dramatic and throw a “TO BE CONTINUED…” out at us. This gives me the sneaking suspicion that the contestants do figure out all of the matches in the end, and that they do it in less than 10 tries, so MTV is having to stretch the action into 10 episodes by other means. If that’s true, than we’re in a race to solve this puzzle before they do! And I will not be defeated.

 

Episode 5: Getting Warmer

In this episode, Ashleigh and Dre have sex (excuse me, “hook up”) in broad daylight, Amber is inexplicably caught in a love triangle between Ethan and Adam (could they BE any more different?), and Dillan and Coleysia reveal that they are both born again virgins. Oh, and the entire cast finally wises up enough to let some couples who might actually have a chance at being matches win the repelling challenge, while the producers take pity on these dumbasses and let them send TWO couples to the Truth Booth this week.

First in the booth? Ashleigh and Dre, of course.

NO MATCH.

We knew that seemed too easy! Ashleigh is despondent. She just boned this guy in the afternoon, you guys, and we know that means it’s serious.

Next are (thank God) Dillan and Coleysia.

PERFECT MATCH!!!!

The crowd goes wild. And so do we! Because a) we sort of already knew that and b) now we can do some serious damage to our spreadsheet by crossing out all of Dillan’s other possible matches, and all of Coleysia”s as well. But wait, there’s more! Since we know that only 2 of the matches were correct at the end of episode 3, and Ethan + Amber and Dillan + Coleysia were among those couples, we now see that every other match made that night was wrong:

This rules out 8 more couples, including some of our “likely” couples like Ryan + Kayla, Adam + Brittany, and Scali + Paige. Major!

So now our chart looks like this…

…with all of the remaining eligible players down to either 6 or 7 possible matches each.

At the end of the episode, the group pairs off and gets 5 matches correct – a new record! Since we already know 2 of the five for sure, that leaves us with 3 of 8 remaining couples correct, and assigns a 38% probability to those matchups (with increased probabilities to the bolded couples due to previous ceremony matches):

This gets interesting, because four of these couples are favorites to be matches, including Wes + Kayla, Chris T + Paige, Adam + Shanley, and John + Jacy…but only 3 of them can be correct.

But OMG, what’s this? MTV is dropping another truth bomb on us, the obsessed viewership. Last week they gave us an outline of two silhouettes of people and told us they were a match. This week, they give us this .gif and tell us that the picture that matches those two silhouettes is a match.

Without going into detail about how I figured this out (cough, cough), it’s Joey and Brittany! And thanks, MTV, for almost giving me a seizure there.

Now we have our players down to 5 or 6 possible matches each, like so:

But what’s more interesting is our match analysis from all of the previous ceremonies:

We can see now that we have 2 groups of couples that are up to a 50% chance of being right, and 2 groups in which only 1 of 4 couples is correct. This sets up a logic puzzle: for instance, is Wes + Kayla is the right match from Episode 1, and Adam + Shanley and John + Jacy join them as the 2 correct matches left from Episode 2, that means that we’d have identified our remaining 3 matches in Episode 5, and we’d have to rule out popular fan matches like Chris T + Page and Scali + Simone. Very interesting indeed.

Episode 4: The Ex Factor

Oh no they didn’t! MTV totally bussed in all the guys’ exes for a challenge in which the girls had to match each boy with the dastardly deed he done did. This was not particularly conducive to love brewing, but it sure was entertaining…and it shed some positive light on a few of the guys, like Dillan, whose ex tearfully confessed that she is still in love with him because he is so super great.

Anyway Jess, that amazing judge of both body parts and character, finishes in the top 3 and takes now stud-status Dillan on her date. They get along so famously that the others vote them into the Truth Booth.

NO MATCH.

Jessica is sort of bummed, while Coleysia literally dances with joy, and so do we, because now Jessica joins the “only 8 possible matches” club. Meanwhile, Amber has decided she is over Ethan (these people suck at dating, remember?) and proceeds to slither all over Adam, who slithers back.

Craziness ensues at the matching ceremony as the girls start picking whomever the fuck they want, breaking up established couples and letting the randomness trickle down to the point of the last few couples having barely ever spoken (Joey & Jacy, I’m looking at you). The couples are:

Floodlights reveal that 2 of these matches are correct. But wait, we also know that 2 are incorrect – thanks MTV! Since Ethan & Amber are a match, that rules out Ethan & Kayla and Adam & Amber, and our couples chart looks like this:

Since there are only 8 possible matches left in the list, and 2 of them are correct according to the almighty floodlights, each of the remaining couples has a 25% chance of being a match. We’ll add them to our “maybes”, and add Dillan & Jessica to our “nos”, and our chart looks like this:

And now we can start upping our odds on some of the prior couplings, especially the few that have repeated (in bold here):

Based on the statistical evidence at hand, plus my extensive expertise as a longtime obsessive viewer of reality television, I’m going to go ahead and call a match:

Dillan + Coleysia

Stats also suggest that Adam + Brittany is a strong possibility, but I’m not buying it, watching their dynamic. Ryan + Kayla is also a contender, but given that 2 of the remaining Episode 1 couples are correct,  and none of the others seem that feasible, I’m not going to rule out Wes + Kayla just yet.

And with some statistical evidence and a lot of camera time, I’m going to go ahead and throw my support behind one more match: John + Jacy.

So based on this analysis plus what we’ve seen on the show, here are my predictions on correct couples by episode:

Episode 1 (2 couples): Dillan + Coleysia, Wes + Kayla

Episode 2 (4 couples): Ethan + Amber, John + Jacy, Adam + Shanley (hey, they’re both a good time), and…not sure on the fourth.

Episode 3 (2 couples): Ethan + Amber, Dillan + Coleysia

Episode 4 (2 couples): Dillan + Coleysia, not sure (I’d say Scali + Paige, but I had to rule them out in favor of Dillan + Coleysia in Episode 3, since only one couple besides Ethan + Amber could be correct). I’ll go out on a limb here and say Dre + Simone. Seems feasible.

Episode 3: My Love Language is Touch

Oh geez, now Simone and Jacy are close to physically fighting over the previously undesirable John Jacobs, Ryan and Kayla are making out a lot and Wes is sad, Adam and Brittany have had sex but he really kind of hates her, Amber and Ethan are hot and heavy, and Scali is playing mind games with Paige and she is TOTALLY FALLING FOR IT. Drama!

At least by now Brittany has busted out some type of wide-rule spiral notebook and is attempting to make sense out of the game, somehow. The bad news? Each “strategic” conversation she has ends with her insisting that ADAM IS TOTALLY HER MATCH.

Challenge stuff and dates happen and the group, possibly hoping to prevent fisticuffs, votes John and Simone into the Truth Booth.

NO MATCH.

John is visibly relieved. Simone is unmoored. No matter. The contestants discuss their ceremony strategy. Some people want to go with the “pick someone new/random” method that worked so well (?) last time. Others want to pick who they actually like. This pairs end up thusly:

Floodlights tell us that 2 are correct. Contestants are depressed, but we are happy, because we now have a whole new crop of 20% “maybes”. Add in the new John & Simone “no” and our chart is getting interesting:

And then…out of nowhere…or possibly out of boredom or incredulity at the contestant’s complete incompetency at predicting even the most likely of matches, MTV decides to throw us a bone and reveal one perfect match on their website. And it is…

…drumroll…

Ethan & Amber! Aww, and they like each other!

Holy shit, this helps us a lot. Now we can make them a green “YES!”, and rule out any other pairing that involves either of them. That makes our chart look like this:

Now we’re getting somewhere – each one of our 20 contestants is down to 9 or fewer possible matches with Ethan & Amber out of the dating pool. Chris T, John, and Simone are each down to 8, and of course Ethan & Amber themselves are down to 1. This also allows us to revisit our previous ceremony matchups. For instance, once you eliminate the known “nos”, the Episode 1 ceremony couples now each have a 29% chance of being a correct match.

Methinks we’ll be able to start predicting some final pairs soon….

Episode 2: Spin the Bottle

In the second episode, a giant game of spin the bottle breaks out and everybody makes out (hey, that rhymed!). Scali and Paige discover some kind of amazing tongue chemistry. Shanley and Chris T. escape to “pound town” and have sex, even though they aren’t a match. People yell at them. They don’t care, they just had sex. Meanwhile, John tells Simone he wants her in the friend zone, and she’s pretty pissed off because she thought she had him locked down in that whole “I’m way too hot to be giving you the time of day, so you really ought to worship me” kinda way. Some sort of challenge happens. Jessica & Ethan seem to be hitting it off, so they get voted into the Truth Booth.

NO MATCH.

Gah.

Everyone gets really upset, again, and the group comes up with a strategy (?): everyone should pick someone different in the pairs ceremony than they picked last time. This will accomplish…I’m not sure what. But let’s go with it. Pairs are:

Dramatic floodlight ceremony, and…4 of these pairs are correct! That is wondrous, and means that each of these couples has a 40% chance of being a match! Very nice, and clearly the pairings were not that random. Coding all of these couples as yellow “maybes”, and of course Ethan & Jessica as a red “no”, we end here:

Progress! We’re starting to see some strong “maybes”, and we’re down to only 9 possible matches each for 4 of our 20 contestants: Chris T, Shanley, Ethan, and Jessica.

Episode 1: OMG, I love Labyrinth!

So after much back and forth with geeky friends and loved ones, attempting to establish the number of possible couples in this game (is it 10+9+8…? 10 x 9 x 8…?), I gave up and decided to just write them all out. Turns out there are 100 (10 x 10). Score one for rocket science. When you put them all into a grid, it looks like this:

I know that’s hard to read, but trust me, they’re all in there, and there’s 100 of ’em.

Episode 1 starts with a lot of excitement and awkwardness, and a superfluous drunken catfight, lest we forget we’re actually watching a reality show on MTV. In the midst of all of this Chris T. and Shanley discover a mutual love for the David Bowie classic Labyrinth and decide that they must be soul mates. They start kissing a lot. Shanley does well enough in the challenge to win a date and takes Chris, of course, and since they’re getting along so swimmingly, the contestants vote them into the Truth Booth.

NO MATCH.

(I gotta say, I sort of saw that one coming.)

So now we’ve got 99 problems and Chris + Shanley ain’t one, like:

The contestants are distraught. However, not once does anyone bust out a spreadsheet. Or a white board. Or so much as utter the words, “hey y’all, this is basically a giant logic puzzle, let’s come up with a strategy to figure it out and win a million dollars.” Wes does, at one point, let it drop to his date Kayla that he’s an MBA, but stops short of uttering any of the above, and that truly hurts my heart.

At the end of the episode the contestants lock into pairs as follows:

Now, since there are 100 couples and 10 are “matches”, each couple starts with a 10% chance of being a “match”. So if the pairing were done completely at random, 1 of the 10 couples should be correct.

A dramatic reveal involving floodlights happens, and we’re told that 2 of these couples are matches. Since there are 10 pair, each one of these couples now has a 20% chance of being a match. We’ll recognize that elevated status by coding them as yellow “maybes” – so our chart now looks like this:

We haven’t narrowed it down a whole hell of a lot yet, but if we keep working with this system, maybe we’ll get somewhere. We’re already down to 9 possible matches for Chris and 9 for Shanley.

What’s this about?

As soon as I saw a preview for the new MTV show Are You The One?, I began to geek out. Finally, my two great loves, math and reality television, have combined! If you’re not watching this, you really should be. Here’s the premise: ten guys and ten girls who “suck at dating” have been subjected to countless interviews, personality tests, psychological assessments, and what-have-you so that professional matchmakers could find their perfect love match. Each contestant’s love match is in the house. The contestants get 10 tries to pair up. If and when they get every match correct, they win $1 million (and presumably, love).

Each week, the contestants compete in challenges to win dates. While the 3 winners and their selected partners are away, the remaining contestants vote to send one of the winning couples to a “truth booth”, where it is revealed to all if the match is correct or not. At the end of the episode, all contestants pair off and find out how many matches (but not which ones) they got right.

Upon seeing this, my mind began to race – I needed to figure out how likely it was that they couples would actually win. After enlisting my equally geeky husband, crowdsourcing the answer to my highly intelligent group of over 1000 Facebook friends, and even soliciting input from my friend, the stats professor, I could not get a straight answer to this question. So this blog, my friends, is an attempt to solve this puzzle. Enjoy.