Mathematician hacked 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 carry out the data mining of the questionnaires on a dating site and find a girl who is ideally suited to her character. Helped him in this access to supercomputers at the University of California, writes Wired.

In June 2012, McKinley worked on his doctoral dissertation on processing large data arrays and parallel computation methods. At some point he decided to distract himself and register on the OkCupid dating site. It should be noted that this site is based on Harvard students and uses a cunning system for calculating compatibility between potential partners. Each of them answers hundreds of questions about his character, habits and preferences. There are various questions: “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 probability of successful relationships, friendship and enmity.


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

The trick is to look at how a girl answered a certain question, only after you answer it. At the same time, the maximum amount 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 forever remain a mystery to you, and the “compatibility rating” may be slightly inaccurate.

McKinley found only about 100 girls, whose compatibility index exceeded 90%, but even with them they somehow didn’t have a date (Chris was enough for six dates). And then the guy came up with a way to conduct the 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. In three weeks of data mining, his system collected 6 million responses from a test sample of 20 thousand questionnaires.

After filtering, 5,000 girls remained who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco and visited the site during the last month. Chris wrote a Python script to sort the 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 hippie style, musicians and actresses. The second cluster includes 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 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 degree for the second group.

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

June 30, the computer part of the quest is over and the time for dating has come. By July 20, Chris noticed that women from the first cluster often live in the distant parts of the city, and women from the second group often have a medium-sized dog. To save time, he deleted the profile of the first group and reduced the number of candidates by half. In July, the mathematician was able to spend 55 dates. In three cases, it came to the second date, but to no avail, and only on the 88th date, Chris was lucky and he found a truly kindred soul, 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 from a one-year internship from Qatar. Now they are going to get married.