Infographic: The Ever-Expanding Taste Graph by Hunch

More

Founded by Flickr's Caterina Fake and a team of MIT graduates, Hunch was designed as a collective intelligence decision-making system that predicts what you will enjoy based on past decisions. As the site learns more about you, it's recommendations get stronger. And it has something to say about everything with broad categories ranging from home to art to music.

In order to make the best recommendations, Hunch relies on an ever-growing database of connections -- between you and your friends, between you and your interests, etc. -- known internally as the taste graph. Column Five Media put together an infographic that shows that graph in more detail: "what it takes to produce it, what goes into it, and how it works," Hunch explained on its official website.

Infographics are always a bit of a hodgepodge of statistics culled from a variety of sources. Here, we sort through the clutter and pull out some of our favorite facts and figures:

  • 27,000 lines of code went into making the taste graph, which is built using proprietary software written in C and Assembly.
  • Hunch runs the taste graph on a supercomputer with 48 processors and one terabyte of memory.
  • Despite massive computing power, it takes two days for the taste graph to completely refresh. It currently holds 500 million people, 200 million items and 30 billion edges, or links between users and other users or items.
  • More than 80 million THAYs (Teach Hunch About You) questions have been answered and are documented in the taste graph. The average Hunch user has answered 113 THAYs.
  • The taste graph includes two million venues that were added by two million people who checked-in to the various locations.

Check out more Infographics on the Technology Channel.

HUNCH-TASTEGRAPH.jpg

Jump to comments

Nicholas Jackson is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Health channel. A former media aggregator for Slate, he has also worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica, Texas Monthly and other publications.

Get Today's Top Stories in Your Inbox (preview)


Elsewhere on the web

Join the Discussion

After you comment, click Post. If you’re not already logged in you will be asked to log in or register. blog comments powered by Disqus

Video

Miami: The Next Big Start-Up City?

How the city became a center for innovation

Video

Video

A Brief History of Romantic Comedies

From The Atlantic's Chris Orr

Video

Video

Life in 'the New Arctic'

A moving portrait of a fading landscape

Video

Video

The Rise of New York City

A fascinating look at Manhattan in the 1940s

Video

'I Thought It Was Really Funny, but No One Else Did'

A day with New Yorker cartoonist Joe Dator

Video

New Yorkers: The Winemaker

Make your own wine ... in New York City

Video

What Is Methane Hydrate?

"Flaming ice" is a vast natural energy source

Video

NASA's Time-Lapse of the Sun

Now with epic dubstep music

Video

A Video Letter From the Editor

Highlights from the May 2013 issue

Video

Shaken Not Tuned: Cocktail Experiments

Can a tuning fork improve a cocktail?

Video

Video

The Rise of Environmentalism

Tracking 50 years, from the Love Canal disaster to Greenpeace

Video

Is He Cheating? A 1950s Guide

'That little blonde secretary from the office?’

Video

New Yorkers: Vintage Vacuum-Tube Amps

Risking electric shock to restore old amplifiers

Video

The DIY Piano-Bicycle

Everybody needs a hobby

Writers

Up
Down

More in Technology

In Focus

2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest

Just In