The Formula for New Year‘s Flavor

After retiring, Old Li was appointed by the community as a “New Year’s Flavor Index Evaluator.” This was a trendy job, supposedly determined by a "New Year's Flavor Algorithm" developed by a well-known AI company. Every day, Old Li’s job was to walk to different families with a tablet, take a few photos, and ask a few questions.

"Did you put up Spring Festival couplets this year? How many characters?" The app on the tablet would immediately give a score.

"How many dishes did you make for the New Year's Eve dinner? What's the ratio of meat to vegetables?" The score jumped a few more times.

"Did you set off firecrackers at home? What model? What was the sound decibel?" This time the score dropped because firecrackers had long been banned in the city, which was a negative point.

At first, Old Li found this job quite novel and took it seriously, scoring each household. The neighbor Old Wang’s family got deducted two points for using an AI-generated cartoon door god. Old Wang was unhappy, grumbling, "This New Year's flavor is all about having fun.”

Old Li agreed with Old Wang. But the algorithm, like a cold machine, was not humane. Gradually, Old Li realized that everyone was starting to take shortcuts. Some people deliberately wrote the wrong characters on the Spring Festival couplets and called it "anti-traditional" to get extra points. Some adjusted the ratio of meat to vegetables in the New Year's Eve dinner to 9:1, saying "big meat feasts are what New Year's is all about" to get extra points as well. Some even secretly set off electronic firecrackers on their balconies, pretending they were real, just to get one or two extra points.

The community's New Year's flavor index evaluation had become like an "involution." Everyone was studying the loopholes in the algorithm, trying to cater to it by any means. Old Li felt like a puppet, with the invisible "New Year's Flavor Algorithm" pulling the strings.

On New Year’s Eve, Old Li’s family was also evaluated. He mechanically answered the questions to the tablet, "We put up the Spring Festival couplets, six characters. The New Year’s Eve dinner had eight dishes, with a fifty-fifty ratio of meat and vegetables. We didn't set off firecrackers."

The score given by the app was: 68 points, mediocre.

Looking at that score, Old Li felt empty. He suddenly felt like his own family had also lost something. Can New Year's flavor really be measured by a score?

He turned off the tablet and walked to the window, looking at the myriad of lights in the distance. At that moment, he heard a faint sound of firecrackers coming from some unknown corner. The sound was small, but it seemed to break some kind of deadlock, giving Old Li a long-lost warmth. He suddenly thought of something, opened the tablet, and clicked on the backend of the "New Year's Flavor Algorithm," where there was a hidden parameter— "Emotional Resonance Value."

Old Li saw that this value had been 0 for the past few days.

He took a deep breath, picked up his phone, and took a selfie, with the blurry lights outside the window in the background. Then, he uploaded the photo to the community group.

"I think, for the New Year, the most important thing is to be with family," he typed and sent.

On the tablet screen, the New Year's flavor score suddenly jumped from 68 points to 98 points, then to 100 points, and finally, a red alert of "Emotional Resonance Value Off the Charts" was displayed.

The same alert sounded throughout the community. Everyone took out their phones to check the cause.

Old Li looked at the tablet and suddenly smiled. Perhaps, this algorithm wasn't so ruthless after all.

At that moment, there was a knock on the door downstairs. Old Li opened the door and saw his neighbor Old Wang, holding a string of firecrackers that he had just secretly bought, a long-lost smile on his face: "Old Li, let's set some off, just for fun!"

Old Li nodded, took the firecrackers, and looked at the red alert still flashing on the tablet. A new line of text had appeared: "Algorithm has crashed, New Year's flavor has returned."