Tutorials
Eleven tutorials across weeks 2–12: what happens in each tutorial, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
No tutorial in week 1. Tutorials are hands-on, 90-minute labs in weeks 2–12: Thursdays, 2–3.30 pm, Systems Lab 2, starting 4 March. Bring the earlier artefact named on each page and leave with reproducible working. All data is synthetic; solo work is accepted throughout. Teaching pauses from 5–18 April.
Download the synthetic datasets and reference scorer from the course toolkit before your tutorial. Each page below names the preparation, exercise and artefact to keep.
The four blocks on each tutorial page fill its 90 minutes. The corresponding lecture plan identifies the 60-minute lecture selection and about 210 minutes of independent preparation and consolidation. Bring existing working for review; the full teaching pack supplies examples across all three allocations.
Platform Architecture and the Elo Hierarchy
Inspect Tinder, Bumble and Hinge disclosures, implement toy Elo and distinguish a visibility hierarchy from an observed measure of attractiveness.
Week 2 · 4 March 2027
Data Acquisition: Photography as a Quantitative Asset
Treat profile photos as traceable information assets. Test lighting, identity ambiguity and detection confidence using fictional image records.
Week 3 · 11 March 2027
Natural Language Processing in Profile Bios
Tokenise clichés, hold the photo constant and A/B test fictional bios. Explain why a pooled winner can lose in both exposure groups.
Week 4 · 18 March 2027
The Mathematics of the "Match"
Calculate mutual-selection probabilities, constrain the travel radius and separate peak Sunday exposure from a higher match rate.
Week 5 · 25 March 2027
Interaction Protocols: The Initial Message
Classify opening messages with a decision tree. Compare context and cost, and expose why forcing a reply is a broken optimisation target.
Week 6 · 1 April 2027
Game Theory and Asynchronous Communication
Model reply arrivals, response games and ghosting as an observation timeout. A refusal remains terminal even when expected utility disagrees.
Week 7 · 22 April 2027
Threat Modeling and Anomaly Detection
Detect bots, financial scams and identity inconsistencies in synthetic cases. Calculate the cost of false alarms before trusting a flag.
Week 8 · 29 April 2027
Transitioning to Offline Environments
Plan the digital-to-physical handshake: public venues, transport, accessible exits, confirmation and an agreed approach to the bill.
Week 9 · 6 May 2027
Stochastic Modeling of the First Date
Propagate a fictional conversation through a Markov chain, check a simulation against exact probabilities and resolve the Who pays deadlock.
Week 10 · 13 May 2027
Post-Date Analytics and The "Second Date" Metric
Separate observed agreement from inferred subtext. Audit the time budget, evaluate a frozen profile and prepare a reproducible release.
Week 11 · 20 May 2027
System Maintenance and Graceful Deprecation
Design explicit relationship agreements, change requests and respectful endings. Reproduce the final release and document its maintenance.
Week 12 · 27 May 2027