The algorithm method: how internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match

Six million Britons are looking for their perfect partner online before Valentine's day on Friday, but their chance of success may depend on clever maths rather than charismaIn the Summer of 2012, Chris McKinlay was finishing his maths dissertation at the University of California in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of late nights as he ran complex calculations through a powerful supercomputer in the early hours of the morning, when computing time was cheap. While his work hummed away, he whiled away time on online dating sites, but he didn't have a lot of luck – until one night, when he noted a connection between the two activities.One of his favourite sites, OkCupid, sorted people into matches using the answers to thousands of questions posed by other users on the site."One night it started to dawn on me the way that people answer questions on OkCupid generates a high dimensional dataset very similar to the one I was studying," says McKinlay, and it transformed his understanding of how the system worked. "It wasn't like I didn't like OkCupid before, it was fine, I just realised that there was an interesting problem there."McKinlay started by creating fake profiles on OkCupid, and writing programs to answer questions that had also been answered by compatible users – the only way to see their answers, and thus work out how the system matched users. He managed to reduce some 20,000 other users to just seven groups, and figured he was closest to two of them. So he adjusted his re...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Psychology Valentine's Day Online dating Biology Smartphones Technology Features Mobile phones Life and style Internet The Observer Chemistry Science Source Type: news