8^8 – Find another you

"Take the 8^8 test and the likelihood of someone else answering in the exact same pattern as yourself is 1 in 16,777,216"

That requires A) the distribution of answers is even across all 8 options, and B) there are zero correlations between any two answers in the quiz.

Not to mention that the 8 questions have to pretty accurately split the space of human personalities down into eigen-answers that explain the most variance in personality.

And there's just no way to do pick these questions without having the data to analyze in the first place.

Or have your partner take the test, and line up a spare.

The basic claim is false on many levels:

    Very few of us are lucky enough to come across our
    soulmate within our lifetimes. We tend to choose our 
    friends and spouses from the limited pool of people 
    available in our immediate vicinity: students at our
    schools, people who live in our neighborhoods, 
    colleagues at our workplaces. Statistically, it is 
    extremely unlikely that we will come across our
    soulmate.

First off, the notion of "soulmate" is bogus romantic nonsense, and the notion that the person most compatible with us is just like us is demonstrably false. My father and I were very similar to each other and fought and argued all the time, because we were both cantankerous, ornery and contrary.

My life-partner and I--who are as close to "soulmates" as anyone can be to that basically ridiculous idea--are very similar in some respects, very different in others. The areas where we complement each other are as important as the ones where we reinforce each other.

More importantly, the claim that there is some great unexplored mass of humanity where our "soulmate" lurks is bogus. There are only 5000 people in the world. Maybe fewer. If there were more we wouldn't keep running into each other all the time.

That is, the number of people in our tribe is surprisingly small, and anyone who is sufficiently similar to us to answer the questions the same way is already almost certainly a member of it, so dipping into the pool of random strangers across the world is unlikely to improve the odds much in most cases, and citing an anecdote or three--which some people will be tempted to do--does not change this fact. The human social graph is full of islands.

Finally, to work as advertised the test requires that answers to the questions are uncorrelated, which is almost certainly not the case. So most people will find themselves with hundreds of "soulmates", a very few will have none. Unique matches will be extremely rare.

It's a superficially fun idea that turns out to be more of a monument to the failure to understand probability than anything else.

Even then, it’s all the more important to find the questions with the highest entropy, given that you know someone’s already in a popular group. It’s all about evenly dividing the population based on important factors. Evenly dividing people is easy enough, and finding important factors is easy enough, but doing them both at the same time can be very tricky.