Wow! I just happened to (re-)stumble across this site while cleaning up old inactive URLs. Apparently I had bookmarked it a long time ago and just forgotten about it. I have always liked "Groundhog Day", so I read the entire post and all 72 comments. I really enjoyed the post and discussion, but the reason I said "Wow!", is because I couldn't believe that in all that, it seems that NOBODY grasped (or at least no one mentioned) the whole POINT of the movie! So I felt compelled to register and make this comment. There is obviously some "god" or "force" or "karma" or whatever you want to attribute it to, that is forcing Phil to repeat the same day UNTIL he learns a particular "lesson". The reason the day stops repeating has NOTHING to do with "getting the girl". The day ONLY stops repeating because he buys the homeless guy a hot meal and therefore prevents him from dying! (Or perhaps that was just intended to be the final step in his transformation into a "caring person". Remember he was DAILY catching the boy falling out of the tree, as well as other "good deeds".) In order for "Groundhog Day" to be the "feel good" movie that I believe it was intended to be, you have to perceive "getting the girl" as a REWARD for becoming a caring person. In a (probably vain) attempt to keep this "on topic", I suppose you could say that the GOAL of his A/B testing was to "get the girl", and becoming a caring person was simply an unintended (but fortuitous) side-effect.