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A Maximum Deliciousness Model of Beer and Cookie Consumption

From Wendell:

Parallel consumption of beer and cookies has long been assumed in the field of post-colloq receptions. However, the current model for such phenomena evaluates the beer and the cookies independently, and fails to capture a generalization already familiar to the field of department wine tastings: two elements artfully paired are more delicious than equally tasty elements unpaired or poorly paired.

In this semester, we propose an interactional model of beer and cookie consumption. We introduce a correspondence relationship between beer and cookies, and propose that the well-formedness of the overall gustatory experience can be influenced by the relative harmony of the pairing.

For the purposes of this exercise, cookies will be from the Chocolate+X family (where X = some flavor > Chocolate on the Excitement Scale). This is not an essential feature of the model, but rather serves to highlight the effect of beer-cookie correspondence and to provide a secondary exploration of variation within the Chocolate+X paradigm.

Finally, we are not suggesting that this interactional model of beer and cookie consumption should replace the previously assumed independent model — that model is able to capture the crucial generalization that each element is still extremely delicious regardless of the presence or absence of the other. Rather, we argue for implementing a theory of Maximum Deliciousness, with both interactional and independent models operating simultaneously.