The Social Network (2010) - FaceMash Algorithm

The Social Network (2010) - FaceMash Algorithm

I saw Social Network three times in 1 week. Not for entertainment. Not because I had nothing better to do. But because I wanted to understand the math and computer science fundae used in the movie. I would like to discuss one particularly interesting scene from the movie.

You may remember Mark inviting his friend Eduardo to give him his chess algorithm at the beginning of the movie (Mark was drinking, blogging and hacking simultaneously and creating Facemash.com). You may also remember the scribbles on the window:

and

What is this? This is actually the math behind Elo Rating System. Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor.

As explained in the movie, Facemash was quite simple. Not unlike hotornot.com, students went to a page and 2 random images of girls were picked and presented to them. The students then had to click on the hottest girl presented to them and then another set of two girls would be presented asking the students to repeat the same actions they had done. The difference with hotornot was that the girls presented were all Harvard students. In other words, the students were rating girls of Harvard based on their looks (You can imagine why Mark got into trouble).

The algorithm used - The Elo Rating system - insured a fair rating and ranking of the girls. A hot girl A winning over hot girl B girl would gain more points than winning (or being picked) against ugly girl C. Same goes for the following: ugly girl C wins over ugly girl D. ugly girl C gains some points in her general ranking. If ugly girl C wins over hot girl A then ugly girl C gains more points because the ranking of hot girl A is much higher than ugly girl D. The previous scenario is roughly what the algorithm implemented by Mark was doing. It was somewhat insuring a level of fairness despite the misogynistic nature of the product.

In today’s society, the Elo Rating system is used by many rating and ranking system to predict the outcome of matches but also insure a level of fairness between teams of different levels playing against each others. FIFA uses it to rank football teams.

You can read more about the system on wikipedia page(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system).