"Rather than adapt some off-the-shelf software they already had, Jack suggested he could really whip up something special for me."

Now I really was interested and I perched on the edge of the chair. I looked out the corner of my eye to make sure my recorder was running, and I almost slipped off the front of the seat. Powell pretended to jump and I saw his realization that I was tipsy relaxed him.

"One night we met at Bennihana's, and got real social. Come to find out Jack had a unique idea. He had been working, on his own for his own personal use, on some real sophisticated software using, hmm... intelligent automated analysis, he called it. He said he thought we could use it for the dating service."

"If you got people to sign off on accessing their personal data bases?"

"That's it. You're a sharp kid. Jack it was a matter of sociobioloical, uhh, sociobillical..."

"Sociobiology?"

"Anyhow, I asked Jack how he planned to make it work. He said it was all the way you played the game theory."

Somehow I had a mental image of an older embittered man boozing it up in a bar with a younger bitter man.

"He said when he was in college, of course his major was computer science, but his minor was in sociobiology."

"That's an interesting combination."

"Yes, and he never forgot a particular sociobiology study he worked on. It was on how seriously people regard romances, based on their ordinal rank."

"You mean, first love versus second love and so forth?"

"Right. Their survey showed that men and women play the dating game very differently."

I sat back and tried to look nonchalant. I knew he was on the hook.

"You see, if you dug deep and got honest answers, John said, you found boys and girls first loves are totally different. We men are dopes. Our first love, our first crush, is the most serious. That's why it's called puppy love. We're as devoted as puppy dogs. And you know its true."

I gave as noncommittal a nod as I could.

"Women, girls, are the opposite. Their first romance is the least serious. A flirtation, a trifle. They don't take it seriously."

Powell grabbed a white china marker that was behind a collectible plate sitting on the credenza behind his desk.

"This is what we worked out on a napkin."

He strode to a wall and made two big stars, one high and one low. He pointed to the lower star. "Here is the girl's seriousness and expectations for her first romance. And this," he said pointing to the higher star, "is the boy's."

He turned and faced me. "Now this line," and he scraped a descending line on the wall, "is the boy's expectations as he gets rejected in each successive love affair."

He scraped an ascending line from the lower star. "The girl, on the other hand, gets more serious each time."

Where the lines crossed, he drew a neat circle. "At some point, the man will marry the next woman who'll have him, because he doesn't give a damn any more. And there's a point where the woman will marry the next guy she sees because she's frantic."

"It's simple in principle, but was difficult in practice, until Armstrong came up with the analysis tools," he continued. "If you can put together two people whose lines are ready to cross, at the point where the man's apathy meets the woman's desperation--it's true love!"

I must have gone completely blank, because Powell didn't seem to register a reaction from me. He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I had to say something.

"You're telling me you worked on this together, then? I guess you want Jack to get some recognition?"

He brightened a bit. "Oh heck, there's no reason Jack should be hiding his candle under a basket. We came up with the system together. I worked up the questionnaires, and he came up with the software. He's just a lot more shy than I am."

"You think he's shy now," I thought.

"I find this hard to believe," I said. "This still has to be incredibly complex."

"I provided the real-world knowledge, and he wrote the software," said Powell. "In the old days, all we had to go on was the questionnaire the clients filled out. We also have all this data base collection going on. Jack was the fair-haired boy who figgered how to bring the two together and make them work."

He swirled the ice cubes around in his glass. "For example, the software can compare dates and see whether the client is bullshitting on the questionnaire--which is more common than you would think."

"If the client said he was deeply committed to a relationship, and the data mine shows he was making on-line purchases and sending them to multiple locations--it's obvious he was stringing more than one gal along at the same time. It also works the other way. If a guy says a relationship was casual, and his liquor consumption spiked after the break-up, it might be he is covering up how much he was hurt."

"If a someone says she's only into serious relationships, but you see she's been buying enough K-Y jelly to slide a cruise ship out of dry dock, it's obvious she's lying. Chocolate and buying movies on the Lifetime channel show emotional trauma for a woman."

"Jack's software is subtle enough that it can analyze and rank these factors, just so you know when a gal's ready to grab the next guy--and a guy is ready to quit hoping and start marrying."

Powell shrugged. "It's obvious it works."

I think the adrenaline rush was starting to sober him up, so I poured two drinks and handed him one. He sat down like he was drained, but he wanted to finish.

"You take one part sociobiology, one part game theory and one part data mining, mix it all together and, voilà!"

He took a long drink and chuckled in an evil sort of way.

"True love every time!"

I knew I had my story and now I was at the point where I needed to make an exit or I would be too woozy to depart gracefully. I rose and shook his hand.

"It's a great story, and you're a real genius and business success, I must admit. Nobody in the world could ever duplicate such an ingenious program."

Powell gave a self-satisfied grin and leaned back in his chair.

I hustled myself out and left without looking back. I didn't even hail a cab, but went around the corner and caught one there. I went back to the hotel, fell on my bed and put my hands on my head.