2013-05-10
Explanation
The comic depicts an intimate scene where a man cries out "Ow! What are you doing down there?" His partner explains that she's using the "Monte Carlo method" to figure out how to touch him. She describes her approach: randomly flicking different areas, interpreting his response as positive, negative, or neutral, and then developing a probability distribution. When the man protests "Why not just communicate with me?" she dismisses the idea, saying "Can you imagine the sampling bias?"
The humor comes from applying a real computational technique to an absurdly inappropriate context. The Monte Carlo method is a legitimate statistical approach that uses random sampling to approximate solutions to problems that are difficult to solve analytically -- it's widely used in physics, finance, and engineering. The woman is treating intimacy as a mathematical optimization problem rather than a human interaction. The final punchline adds another layer: when the man suggests simple communication (the obvious solution), she rejects it on statistical grounds, arguing that self-reported preferences would introduce "sampling bias" -- a real concern in statistics where the method of data collection skews results. She'd rather cause pain through random experimentation than trust subjective human feedback, perfectly capturing the nerd's tendency to overcomplicate problems by reaching for technical solutions when simple human interaction would suffice.