Decisions, decisions

Like many San Franciscans and people in general, I love going to restaurants. I love trying out new spots, but I especially love going back to places where I’m a regular. One of the best things about living in San Francisco is having a great pool of options to choose from for basically anything (coffee, pastries, Burmese, omakase, etc.) but sometimes it’s hard to figure out what you really want.

With this in mind, I added mine to a heap of recommendation algorithms. Most of the apps that exist are not great. This is because people are fickle (we like to change it up, otherwise we would go to the same restaurant every day and life would be so much easier), and also because we often make decisions with other peoples’ preferences in mind.

Mine is a simple game of “would you rather” that prompts you to pick between as many pairs of restaurants as you can within 60 seconds. Then your preferences are stack ranked and matched with others in the group to maximize overall utility, and the top 3 results are provided. It’s not perfect, but hopefully it helps or is a little bit amusing.