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<pedant>Not log N, but N/e.</pedant>

More seriously, that's the optimal solution if your goal is to maximize the probability that you end up with the single best person in the pool. I don't think that's a good match for most people's objectives when dating.

(If instead each prospective partner has a score chosen uniformly randomly between 0 and 1, and you want to maximize your average partner-score, then you should use a similar strategy but with about sqrt(N) dates before taking the next that's better, instead of N/e. That's still not super-realistic but it's probably more realistic.)



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