For me, the fun part of articles like this is convincing myself it could never work, then re-reading the article a few times and discovering that it does. That

For me, the fun part of articles like this is convincing myself it could never work, then re-reading the article a few times and discovering that it does. That being said, when they talk about the marriage problem I wish they wouldn't talk about it in terms of "at most 100 candidate spouses". Not even mathematicians start life saying "I will have 100 potential partners in life". The "marriage" problem is a strategy for selecting the best item amongst k items. The strategy for finding the best item full stop hinges on how the k items are selected. Both in marriage and hiring (the two obvious places to apply this sort of thing), where the pool is drawn from has a much bigger impact than getting the best person in the pool. Take hiring as a better example than marriage (because with jobs it often the case that there are a known, finite number of applicants). Most of them will be people who are difficult to employ, floating around in the job market. If you wanted the real 'best', you need an aggressive poaching strategy rather than a best-in-the-pool strategy.