HEART2HEART

chapter 11: initiative

"Morning."

Jisoo looked up from her table, as Taehyung made his way into the office the next morning.

She smiled at him. "Good morning."

"Something feels off-" Jungkook, who had been busy working on his algorithm the entire week, glanced in direction, feeling a sense of disruption in the force. "You guys are not going at each other's throats first thing in the morning... Is everything okay?"

"What do you mean?" Taehyung sneered. "We don't... We don't always go at each other's throat."

He glanced at Jisoo, who shrugged.

Taehyung sighed. "Okay, fine, maybe we used to or whatever, but-"

"Okay, whatever, that's between the two of you-" Jungkook said nonchalantly, as he grabbed his laptop and brought it over to Jisoo's desk, so the both of them could see. "Anyway, I need you guys to help me check this out."

Taehyung and Jisoo peered over at Jungkook's screen, which was filled with lines and lines of code. "Check what out?"

"So-" Jungkook looked at the both of them. "I've been working on this algorithm..."

"There he goes again-" Taehyung sighed as he gave Jungkook a pat on the back and turned to Jisoo. "You see what I mean? A high-achiever. Cannot believe this guy's my friend."

Jisoo nodded and made a face. "Mad lad."

"Yeah, anyway-" Jungkook continued, completely unfazed by their teasing. "It tweaks the previous algorithm a little bit - previously the network predicts the duration of the relationship, then passes this through an activation function... and out comes the prediction - whether the relationship is successful or not. But these few days, I've been thinking - can the duration of a relationship really determine how good the relationship is...?"

"Definitely not," Jisoo piped in. "I'd choose a good, short relationship over a long, painful relationship any day."

"True, but I mean..." Taehyung thought for a while, getting serious at once. "To be fair, that's something we've considered in the past. We did consider whether the duration of a relationship is all you need to take into account in determining the successfulness of the relationship. In reality, that isn't the case. But other factors... they're so hard to quantify, you know? Off the bat, maybe we can ask couples to rate how happy they were in the relationship, but that's so subjective, you know?"

"That's true..." Jungkook pursed his lips. "But ignoring the subjectivity of that, wouldn't you think that adding that into the algorithm would still be beneficial to the system? I think yes."

"How would you quantify that though?"

"You know those online quizzes?" Jungkook clicked open a browser page, showing it to them. "There's plenty of those out there - be it for illnesses, MBTI, all kinds of things - and there's a percentage of how likely you are to have a certain trait. I'm sure you guys have taken at least one of those quizzes?"

Jisoo nodded.

"Yeah, I have, but how accurate are those quizzes, really?" Taehyung furrowed his eyebrows. "I took a quiz on being a narcissist before and the quiz came back to me with a 97%."

Jisoo stifled a laugh. "Oh, that's highly accurate then."

"Excuse you?"

Jungkook laughed. "The bickering started a little later than usual today."

"But yeah, I get what you mean-" Jisoo finally piped in. "So you're proposing that with the existing couples we've trained our algorithm with, we make them do a quiz to encompass how happy they were in their relationship?"