How do you find the partner of your dreams online? Just do the math. (From 2014)
folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA's math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morning, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer in Colorado that he was using for his PhD dissertation. While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.
On average, respondents select 350 questions from a pool of thousands—“Which of the following is most likely to draw you to a movie?" or "How important is religion/God in your life?" For each, the user records an answer, specifies which responses they'd find acceptable in a mate, and rates how important the question is to them on a five-point scale from "irrelevant" to "mandatory.
The experience kindled his interest in applied math, ultimately inspiring him to earn a master's and then a PhD in the field. "They were capable of using mathematics in lots of different situations," he says. "They could see some new game—like Three Card Pai Gow Poker—then go home, write some code, and come up with a strategy to beat it."
After three weeks he'd harvested 6 million questions and answers from 20,000 women all over the country. McKinlay's dissertation was relegated to a side project as he dove into the data. He was already sleeping in his cubicle most nights. Now he gave up his apartment entirely and moved into the dingy beige cell, laying a thin mattress across his desk when it was time to sleep.
Now he just had to decide which cluster best suited him. He checked out some profiles from each. One cluster was too young, two were too old, another was too Christian. But he lingered over a cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists. This was the golden cluster. The haystack in which he'd find his needle. Somewhere within, he'd find true love.
He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid members are notified when someone views their pages, so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-old women on Monday, another thousand 40-year-old women on Tuesday, looping back through when he reached 27-year-olds two weeks later. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some 400 a day. And messages began to roll in.
The math portion of McKinlay's search was done. Only one thing remained. He'd have to leave his cubicle and take his research into the field. He'd have to go on dates.
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