Today I stumbled upon the funniest, nerdiest love-story in a long time. Before I’ll tell you all about it, let me lose a few words about finding love in the 21st century.
Have you ever heard about Tinder? It’s a social dating app on your phone that uses all the information of your facebook-account to build a profile of you. Then you basically get a stack of profiles from women in your city that you can judge. All you see is some photos, the hobbies and friends you have in common. Swipe left to decline them, swipe right to approve. (Rings a bell? It’s similar to the initial idea of Facebook) If she/he approves your profile too, you both get invited to chat. Simple as that.
Except for it’s not. It feels bizarre to swipe through those profiles like you browse through a restaurant-menu, basing your judgment on shallow and random informations like a photo. It’s arbitrary and not very helpful (and pretty much bullshit) – unless you are timid, shy or not self-confident enough to get to know someone in real life.
But I understand the intent (and why apparently 2 million people use it daily): It’s handy, it’s efficient, it’s under control. It helps improving your options. An app like that reduces the risks and hurdles of getting to know someone in the «analog world». And this is only the beginning.
If you are more serious to finding love, you might try one of the many matchmaker-websites like «OKCupid» oder «Elite-Parter» – expensive portals with a data driven matching-approach: You answer a questionnaire with hundreds of specific points, send in photos and pay a hefty fee. Then some secret algorithm will run your profile through the database and match it with the profiles of potential dates. It’s a more scientific, big-dataish approach. Simple as that.
Except for it’s not. People tend to overestimate themselves in those questionnaires (or they simply lie), pushing and tweaking their profiles, photoshopping their pictures. Depending on the (sometimes not so clever) algorithms of the site and the bullshit-skills of your opponent, you might literally be dating anyone. Plus all those questions do not cover the magic that’s needed between two people to develop something worth being called love. The little things you love about someone. The smell of their hair. The sound of their voice. The edges and quirks no one would add to their profile but actually make them special. What love is all about – it cannot be measured.
Turns out, predicting love with mathematics seems as effective as astrology, as the following story shows.
It’s about Chris McKinlay, a math genius in California, who decides to hack the algorithm of OKCupid to find his true love. He engineers the whole system backwards to collect millions of profile-information to then build the perfect matching-profile for the category of women he would like to date – via statistical clustering. It still takes him 88 dates to finally find the right girl. It’s a bewildering and strange story they’ll one day have to tell their kids. And somehow it’s a parable for finding love in the 21st century. But read for yourself.