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Think OKCupid has an OK data set, but don’t trust their algorithm to sufficiently match you with the perfect mate? If you’re mathematician Chris McKinlay, there’s only one simple solution to this quandary: build your own algorithm that will pool only the best matches, thereby increasing your chances of finding the ideal wife.
Chris McKinlay: I Hacked OkCupid. Chris McKinlay uses the power of super-computing - and his own brain - to 'trend globally' on a dating website. Then he finds true love. Chris McKinlay uses the power of super-computing - and his own brain - to 'trend globally'. By Chris McKinlay. Chris McKinlay uses his computing skills to find a date on OkCupid. Add to Playlist.
According to Wired, McKinlay set up six OKCupid profiles operated by bots and used them to gather data about 20,000 women on the dating site. Then he employed a method of dividing the women into groups called K-Modes, leaving him with 7 different statistically different clusters. From those 7, he was able to determine which two groups were the most appealing to him.
After putting those two groups through yet more series of tests–which you can read about over at Wired–and going on 87 OKCupid dates that yielded few genuine leads, McKinlay met Christine Tien Wang, an artist. Towards the end of their first date, he felt so comfortable with her that he confessed the whole romantically questionable charade: the equations, the data mining, all of it.
“I thought it was dark and cynical,” Wang told Wired. “I liked it.”
A year later, he proposed to her over Skype. No word on whether McKinlay is devising a system to determine the best time to have kids.
In 2012, UCLA Ph.D. student Chris McKinlay spent most of his time working on his dissertation dealing with high-dimensional clustering. In his spare time, he answered questions on the dating website OkCupid.
McKinlay decided to apply the same high-level mathematics he was using in his doctoral research to understand how OkCupid really worked.
“I was interested in meeting someone,' said McKinlay, who is now doing postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota. “But it started off as an intellectual exercise. Once I realized how effective [the site’s method] was, though, I decided to take the dating part more seriously.”
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OkCupid matches singles through a series of questions: You state how you’d like someone else to answer and rate how important each question is to you. To view another user’s answers, you must first answer the same questions yourself.
McKinlay said most users start off answering the questions ad hoc, without regard to how each answer will affect one’s matches in a high-dimensional space.
UCLA alumnus Chris McKinlay used the knowledge he gained from working on his dissertation on high-dimensional clustering to find a more efficient way mathematically to find his true love on an online dating site. The result: He found Christine Tien Wang, an artist who earned her M.F.A. at UCLA in the same year McKinlay got his Ph.D. They plan to wed in 2015.
After a month of gathering data, McKinlay figured out which questions were most important and that responses clustered around a set of common beliefs. “When 20,000 women answer enough questions, you get seven different archetypes, or clusters,” he explained. Armed with his research, he adjusted his own profile to better match the archetypes that most appealed to him.
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The results were immediate and dramatic.
“I started receiving several hundred profile views a day, a 20-fold increase,” he said. “And I started getting 10 unsolicited messages a day, when most men get zero.”
He found he was now a top match for a sizeable proportion of the OkCupid population. He started going on dates — lots of them.
“I went on one date a day for three months over the summer of 2012,” he said. “The first few dates were romantic, like hikes and dinners, but that became exhausting.” He switched over to 20-minute coffee dates, finding he could learn more about a person in a simpler environment.
After a while, he had to step back and figure out why he was going on so many dates. Was it just to see how long he could keep it going?
That’s when he met Christine Tien Wang, another UCLA alumna with an M.F.A., an artist and prison activist.
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“Her message was different. It was very direct and very real,” McKinlay said.
Said Wang: “The idea that women could be grouped into general clusters was interesting. As a cultural thinker and an artist, I thought about the clusters from an idea of gender performativity and psychoanalysis.”
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McKinlay's research has ultimately led to a planned summer 2015 wedding and also to a book by McKinlay. 'Optimal Cupid: Mastering the Hidden Logic of OkCupid' has attracted major media interest and inquiries from movie studios who think the project has a '(500) Days of Summer' feel.
“Social media is ubiquitous now, and we’re all data scientists,” McKinlay said. “The question is: Are we effective?”
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This story appears in UCLA Magazine online.
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