Farm it out to many people in return for some tiny (but not monetary) reward.

OKCupid used to have a feature for "choose my best image". Users submit two images, then rate other people's images. One of your images is presented alongside one other image from some other user, and someone else has to pick which one they like most. OKC then used their stats to give some analysis to it.

It was sort of great, except there were usually too few people to get any kind of sensible results.

It's easy to see that this could be a useful approach.

I am curious, why do you consider it insane?

insanity is in the eye of beholder. There are probably thousands of executives in the world that use the help of their personal assistants when organizing dating. Leap from that to use virtual assistants is not a biggie. however, there are probably none or just a few crazy geeks that even try to use the help of machine vision for dating.

same here, the robot was the trigger. But i guess one point is to prove that everything is theorically possible.

I actually emailed this to all my friends/managers at work, then I got to the vibrator part, then I realized it was written in jest, then I frantically scrambled to recall the email.

That didn't strike me as weird. I just believed his primary dev environment is Ubuntu.

Like people say, "I created a presentation on my Macbook", as opposed to "my iPhone".

Agreed, the tendency of people to refer to their phones/computers by their marketing names is much, much higher among Apple consumers.

union of concerned robots may have some concerns wrt. your comment and attitude it projects