Mathematician hacked a dating site and found a dream girl

The 35-year-old mathematician Chris McKinlay from the University of California at Los Angeles took just 88 days to complete a date-mining profile on a dating site and find a girl who is perfect in character. Helped him in this access to the University of California supercomputers, writes Wired.

In June 2012, McKinley worked on a doctoral dissertation on large data processing and parallel computing methods. At some point, he decided to take his mind off and register on the OkCupid dating site. It should be noted that this site was founded by Harvard students and uses a tricky system for calculating compatibility between potential partners. Each of them answers hundreds of questions about their character, habits and preferences. The questions are very different: “Do you like cats?” (What answers do you accept from others), “How often do you use Facebook?”, “How long do you plan to meet?”, Etc. After that, you can see how this or that person suits you. The system shows the likelihood of a successful relationship, friendship and hostility.



The logic is that the more the partners are alike, the better they will be with each other.

The trick is that you can see how the girl answered a certain question only after you answer it yourself. Moreover, the maximum number for each participant is limited to 350 answers, while the total bank contains thousands of questions. In other words, some of the girls' answers will always remain a mystery to you, and the “compatibility rating” may be slightly inaccurate.

McKinley found only about 100 girls whose compatibility rate exceeded 90%, but even with them somehow did not work out (Chris had enough for six dates). And then the guy came up with a way to conduct an analysis according to his own rules.

Chris created 12 fake profiles, answering questions randomly. After that, he was able to access the full profiles of the girls with all the answers. For three weeks of data mining, his system collected 6 million responses from a test sample of 20 thousand profiles.

After filtering, there were 5,000 girls left who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco and have visited the site over the past month. Chris wrote a Python script to sort girls with different characteristics into seven clusters , like Caring, Believers, Tattoos, etc.



He found two clusters especially interesting. In the first there were girls of about 25 years of hip style, musicians and actresses. The second cluster included older girls with creative professions in literature and design. So Chris created two of his profiles to focus on each of these clusters - and answered the 500 most popular questions in each of the groups. Here Chris already answered the questions honestly, although he slightly optimized the answers depending on the cluster. For example, to the question “What is more important for you: love or sex”, he answered “love”, but indicated a lower degree of importance of the answer for the first group and a higher one for the second.

The results were astounding. He immediately received more than 10,000 results with compatibility of more than 90%. At the last stage, it was necessary to attract the attention of girls. The OkCupid website informs the user if someone logs into his profile, so Chris configured the bot to automatically visit profiles of all girls with an indicator of more than 90%. Then he checked which of them came to him. Naturally, the girls were also surprised by such high rates of compatibility - Chris received from them up to 20 messages a day.

On June 30, the computer part of the quest ended and it was time for a date. By July 20, Chris noticed that women from the first cluster often live in the outskirts of the city, while women in the second cluster often have a medium-sized dog. To save time, he deleted the profile of the first group and halved the number of candidates. In July, the mathematician was able to spend 55 dates. In three cases, it came to a second date, but to no avail, and only on the 88th date Chris was lucky and he found a truly soul mate, a 28-year-old artist with whom he had a compatibility rating of 91%. They continued to meet even a year later, when the girl returned after a year of internship from Qatar. Now they are going to get married.