SOUL MATES
随机伴侣
Q. What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world?
Q．如果每个人都有且仅有一个知心伴侣，但这个人是随机匹配的，会发生什么？ 8211;本杰明o斯塔菲尼
A. WHAT A NIGHTMARE THAT would be.
A．噢，那将是多么可怕的一个噩梦啊！
There are a lot of problems with the concept of a single random soul mate. As Tim Minchin put it in his song 8220;If I Didn 8217;t Have You 8221;:
首先，随机匹配一个知心爱人，这个想法本身就是有许多问题的，正如蒂姆o明钦在他的《如果没有你》中唱的那样：
Your love is one in a million;
你的爱是百万里挑一；
You couldn 8217;t buy it at any price.
花多少钱也买不来；
But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves,
但剩下的九十九万九千九百九十九人里；
Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.
统计上讲，总有一些差不多一样好。
But what if we did have one randomly assigned perfect soul mate, and we couldn 8217;t be happy with anyone else? Would we find each other?
但如果我们真的只有唯一一个完美的知心伴侣，换成其他任何一个人都不行会怎么样呢？我们会找到彼此吗？
We 8217;ll assume your soul mate is chosen at birth. You don 8217;t know anything about who or where they are, but-as in the romantic cliché-you recognize each other the moment your eyes meet.
假设你的知心伴侣在你一出生时就已经确定了，你不知道是谁，也不知道在哪里，但正如浪漫桥段中常见的那样，当你们四目相视的时候，就会认出彼此。
Right away, this would raise a few questions. For starters, would your soul mate even still be alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93 percent mortality rate). If we were all paired up at random, 90 percent of our soul mates would be long dead.
但问题马上就出现了。首先，你的那位知心伴侣还活着吗？从古至今总计约有1000亿人曾经活在这个世界上，但现在总人口只有70多亿人（也就是说人类的死亡率有93％）。如果我们的那位伴侣真的是随机匹配的，那么有90％以上的几率他们已经去世很久了。
That sounds horrible. But wait, it gets worse: A simple argument shows we can 8217;t limit ourselves just to past humans; we have to include an unknown number of future humans as well. See, if your soul mate is in the distant past, then it also has to be possible for soul mates to be in the distant future. After all, your soul mate 8217;s soul mate is.
这真是太可怕了！不过等等，事情其实会更糟。既然我们的伴侣可以是已经逝去的人，那么也有可能是将来还没出生的人。毕竟你的伴侣的伴侣就是生活在未来嘛。
So let 8217;s assume your soul mate lives at the same time as you. Furthermore, to keep things from getting creepy, we 8217;ll assume they 8217;re within a few years of your age. (This is stricter than the standard age-gap creepiness formula,1 but if we assume a 30-year-old and a 40-year-old can be soul mates, then the creepiness rule is violated if they accidentally meet 15 years earlier.) With the same-age restriction, most of us would have a pool of around half a billion potential matches.
所以我们需要假设你的知心伴侣和你生活在同一个时代，此外为了避免事情变得奇怪，还需假设他/她的年龄和你只相差几岁。（这个要求要比标准年纪差诡异指数1更严格一些，但如果一个30岁的人和一个40岁的人可以成为知心伴侣，要是他们早15年遇到彼此就会违背诡异指数准则了。）有了年龄相近的限制，那么可选的伴侣池就只剩不到5亿人了。
But what about gender and sexual orientation? And culture? And language? We could keep using demographics to try to narrow things down further, but we 8217;d be drifting away from the idea of a random soul mate. In our scenario, you wouldn 8217;t know anything about who your soul mate was until you looked into their eyes. Everybody would have only one orientation: toward their soul mate.
那么性别和性取向的问题呢？还有文化和语言的不同呢？我们可以用人口统计数据进一步缩小选择范围，但这就违背了最初随机选择的要求了。在我们假设的情况中，在你遇上你的知心伴侣之前对他/她是一无所知。每个人有且仅有一个性取向，那就是他/她的另一半。
The odds of running into your soul mate would be incredibly small. The number of strangers we make eye contact with each day can vary from almost none (shut-ins or people in small towns) to many thousands (a police officer in Times Square), but let 8217;s suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day. (I 8217;m pretty introverted, so for me that 8217;s definitely a generous estimate.) If 10 percent of them are close to your age, that would be around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you would find true love only in one lifetime out of 10,000.
这种情况下遇上知心伴侣的可能性微乎其微。每天与我们有眼神交流的陌生人可能一个都没有（比如那些死宅或者住在小镇上的人），也有可能有数千人（比如站在美国时代广场上的警察叔叔）。我们不妨假设你平均每天都会去看几十个以前从未看到过的陌生人（对于我这种内向的人来说，这个数字已经是高估了），如果其中有10％的人和你年龄相近，那么一生中你会看到约5万个潜在的伴侣。而之前我们已经估算过所有可能的伴侣人数约为5亿人，因而你找到真爱的几率只有万分之一。
With the threat of dying alone looming so prominently, society could restructure to try to enable as much eye contact as possible. We could put together massive conveyer belts to move lines of people past each other . . .
由于这么一来，孤独一生的可能性实在是太大，整个社会可能会重新进行组织，尽可能增加眼神交流的机会。比如我们可以建造两个巨大的相向运动的传送带，上面各站一排人……
. . . but if the eye contact effect works over webcams, we could just use a modified version of ChatRoulette. ……
不过如果通过网络摄像头看到彼此也算眼神交流的话，我们可以使用改良版的聊天轮盘。
If everyone used the system for eight hours a day, seven days a week, and if it takes you a couple of seconds to decide if someone 8217;s your soul mate, this system could-in theory-match everyone up with their soul mates in a few decades. (I modeled a few simple systems to estimate how quickly people would pair off and drop out of the singles pool. If you want to try to work through the math for a particular setup, you might start by looking at derangement problems.)
如果每个人每周7天，每天花8个小时在这个系统上，并且每次只需几秒钟就能判定看到的人是不是知心伴侣，那么理论上来讲，这套系统能在几十年内帮助所有人找到知心伴侣。（我测试了一些简单的情形，用来估计人们匹配到知心伴侣的速率。如果你想自己去计算某些特殊情况下需要多长时间，可以先去看看错排问题。）
In the real world, many people have trouble finding any time at all for romance-few could devote two decades to it. So maybe only rich kids would be able to afford to sit around on SoulMateRoulette. Unfortunately for the proverbial 1 percent, most of their soul mates would be found in the other 99 percent. If only 1 percent of the wealthy used the service, then 1 percent of that 1 percent would find their match through this system-one in 10,000.
在现实情况下，许多人都不可能把所有时间都用来寻找伴侣，更少有人会花20年去干这事，所以大概只有富家子弟才玩得起这种知心伴侣轮盘吧。不幸的是，对于那最富有的1％的富人来说，他们的伴侣极有可能是在剩下的99％的人群之中。所以只有最富有的1％的富人会使用这项服务，而这1％的富人之中又只有1％找到了真爱，这样算来找到知心伴侣的几率还是只有万分之一。
The other 99 percent of the 1 percent2 would have an incentive to get more people into the system. They might sponsor charitable projects to get computers to the rest of the world-a cross between One Laptop Per Child and OKCupid. Careers like 8220;cashier 8221; and 8220;police officer in Times Square 8221; would become high-status prizes because of the eye contact potential. People would flock to cities and public gathering places to find love-just as they do now.
至于这1％中剩下的那99％的人2，则会有动力出资让更多的人用上这套系统。他们可能会资助一些慈善项目，项目类型介于 8221;一娃一本 8221;（One Laptop Per Child）和OKCupid（美国交友网站）之间。像超市收银员、时代广场上的警察叔叔这样的职业可能会成为香饽饽，因为他们每天都会和大量人眼神接触。人们会蜂拥到城市和公共场所去寻找爱情 8211;不过他们现在不也是这么做的嘛。
But even if a bunch of us spent years on SoulMateRoulette, another bunch of us managed to hold jobs that offered constant eye contact with strangers, and the rest of us just hoped for luck, only a small minority of us would ever find true love. The rest of us would be out of luck.
但即使有一群人在知心伴侣轮盘上花费大把光阴，另一群人去干那些每天能与大量陌生人有眼神接触的工作，剩下的人则听天由命，我们之中仍然只会有很少一部分人能找到真爱，剩下的人就只能怪自己时运不济咯。
Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They 8217;d want to join the club, so they 8217;d get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They 8217;d marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family.
在如此之大的压力下，有些人可能会弄虚作假。他们想摆脱单身一族，因而他们可能会随手找一个单身的人假装是一见钟情。他们会结婚，把他们之间的不和隐藏起来，还要努力在朋友和家人面前装出笑脸。
A world of random soul mates would be a lonely one. Let 8217;s hope that 8217;s not what we live in.
一个充满随机知心伴侣的世界实在孤独得吓人，让我们祈祷这不是我们的现实世界吧。
1 xkcd, 8220;Dating pools, 8221;http://xkcd /314.
1． xkcd， 8221;Dating pools 8221;，诡异指数准则：不要和比你年龄的一半大7岁以下岁数的人谈恋爱。
2 8220;We are the zero point nine nine percent! 8221;
2． 我们是那0.99％的人！（梗出自于占领华尔街运动）