Computer Science view of talking to new girls at Salsa event

Computer Science view of talking to new girls at Salsa event: You have a life story and she has a life story - those are graphs of information, with nodes and edges. You ask one open ended question and she'll give you one node's description in the graph. By open ended I mean not yes/no - because yes/no is just binary and you only get one bit of information back. Open ended questions like "how did you get into Salsa" typically give you a lot more than a bit. Once you have one node to start with, you can do a depth first search to a common interest node. That is, you ask a question about the first node, which gives you an adjacent node. Then you can ask about that, etc, etc, moving step by step. Once you hit a common interest node, you make that clear by expressing how you share information or opinion about that node. This creates a little connection between your graph and her graph, a new edge. You continue to move from node to node, connecting, adding edges. If a conversation gets deep enough, you might even start adding new nodes to both of your graphs. And if things go well, your graphs end up fairly entangled, with lots of interesting connections. If they don't, you end up with just one or two ephemeral edges connected to her, and they will probably fade with time. Contrast this to talking to a friend. There's a major difference - you've already got edges connecting your graphs to start with. You also have random access - you can go anywhere pretty quickly - rather than step by step, searching and checking, coherently from one node to the next. That freedom and that experience is part of why friendship is so valuable.