Is there any way to find love with the help of mathematics? It might be hard to even consider that possibility, but when an expert in this field deploys all his skills to meet his “other half”, it makes more sense than we imagine. That brings us to the story of Chris McKinlay, a mathematician who a couple of years ago “hacked” the dating site OKCupid to become the number one suggestion for at least 30,000 women…
The Dating Site That Runs on Questions
Imagine a mathematician living in a UCLA cubicle on a minimum salary, working on his thesis. His dissertation required a remote connection to a supercomputer to process his calculations, and while waiting for the results, he “killed time” on OKCupid. As its name suggests, OKCupid is a dating site with the particularity of presenting suggestions about potential partners through multiple-choice questions. Results are shown as percentages, but the detail is that each user chooses which questions to answer, and the popularity of those questions has a huge influence on the “compatibility” calculated by OKCupid.
The Hack: Twelve Profiles and a Python Script
It's time to give our mathematician his real name: Chris McKinlay. Apparently, McKinlay hadn't chosen the most attractive questions for the women registered on the site, so his results were far below what he expected. That led him to conclude he couldn't access the site like an ordinary user, and he faced the challenge as a mathematician. The first step was creating twelve fake OKCupid profiles and a Python script to extract information directly focused on his interest (heterosexual and bisexual women aged 25 to 45)
Logically, OKCupid's system detected McKinlay's bots, but with the help of a friend he was able to reprogram them to match the click and typing speed of a real human. Three weeks later, he had more than six million questions and answers. What followed was applying a modified algorithm (K-Modes) to find a pattern in that data, and generating a total of seven different “groups” of women. He chose the two groups he was most interested in, and created a special profile for each, adjusted to the new parameters.
A Trending Topic of Dates
McKinlay began receiving an average of ten unsolicited messages per day, an extraordinary number when the average for any other heterosexual or bisexual man on OKCupid is zero. He had basically become a sort of “trending topic” on the site, and started having dates... many dates. Of course, that meant leaving his “comfort zone,” and if there's something McKinlay could confirm today, it's that the third time is not the charm.
The 88th Date
In his personal case, the magical moment was the 88th date, when he met Christine Tien Wang, 28, an artist and activist. OKCupid had assigned a “91” to their compatibility, and upon meeting for the first time, let's say the famous archer cherub didn't fail. Three dates and two weeks later, they both closed their OKCupid accounts, and a year after that first date, a ring appeared. She said yes.
