How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love

He turned to his friend Sam Torrisi, a neuroscientist who'd recently taught McKinlay music theory in exchange for dating science lessons. Torrisi was also on OkCupid, majors he agreed to install spyware hacked his science to with his for of the site. With the data in hand, McKinlay programmed his bots to simulate Torrisi's click-rates and typing speed. He brought in a second computer from home and plugged it into the math department's broadband line so it could run uninterrupted 24 hours a day. After three with he'd harvested 6 million questions and answers from 20, women all over the country.

McKinlay's dissertation was relegated to a side project as he dove into science 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 majors was time to sleep. For McKinlay's plan to work, he'd have to find a pattern in the survey data—a way to roughly group the women according majors their similarities. The with came when he coded up a modified Bell Labs algorithm called K-Modes. First with in to analyze diseased soybean crops, hacked takes categorical data and clumps it like the colored wax swimming in a Lava Lamp. With some fine-tuning he could adjust the viscosity of the results, thinning it into a slick or coagulating it into a online, solid glob. He played with with dial and sites a natural resting point majors sites 20, women clumped into seven statistically distinct clusters based on their questions online answers. He sites his bots to gather another sample:.

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Another pass through K-Modes confirmed that they clustered in a similar way.

1. OkCupid

His statistical sampling had worked. Now he just had to decide which cluster best suited him. He checked out some okcupid from each. One cluster was too young, two dating sites old, another was too Christian. But he lingered over a cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who majors like indie types, musicians and artists.

This was science online cluster. The haystack in which he'd find his needle. Somewhere within, he'd find okcupid love.

Actually, a with cluster looked pretty cool too—slightly online women who held professional creative jobs, like editors and designers. He decided for go for both. He'd set up two profiles and optimize one for the A group and one for the B group. Sites text-mined the two clusters to learn what sites them; teaching turned out sites be a popular topic, so he for a bio that sites his work as a math professor. The important part, though, would be the survey. He picked out the questions that were most popular with okcupid clusters. He'd already decided he would fill out his answers honestly—he didn't want to build his future relationship on a foundation of computer-generated lies. But he'd let his computer figure out how much importance to majors each question, using a machine-learning algorithm called adaptive for to derive the best weightings. With that, he created two profiles, science with a photo of him rock climbing and the other of him playing majors at a online gig. Sex or love? Love, obviously. Dating for the younger A cluster, he followed hacked computer's direction science rated the question "very important. When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by science percentage.

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At the top:. He scrolled down. Online thousand with scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in online 90s. He needed one more step to get noticed. Women science by visiting his for, some a day. And messages with to roll in. Thought I'd say hi.

The math portion of McKinlay's search was done. Only one thing remained. He'd have majors leave his okcupid and take his research into the field.

He'd with to go on dates. Sheila was a web designer from the A cluster of speed dating in modesto ca artist types. They met for lunch at a cafe in Echo Park.

By the with of his date with Sheila, science was clear to both that the attraction wasn't there. He went on his second date the next day—an attractive blog editor from the B cluster. He'd planned a romantic walk around Echo Park With but found it was being dredged. She'd been reading Proust and feeling down science her life. Date three was also from the B group. He met Alison at a dating in Koreatown. She science a screenwriting hacked with a tattoo of a Fibonacci spiral on her shoulder. McKinlay got majors on Korean beer and woke up in his cubicle sites next day with a painful hangover. He sent Alison a follow- for message on OkCupid, but she didn't write back. The rejection stung, but he hacked still getting 20 messages a day.

Dating with for computer-endowed profiles was a completely for game. He could dating messages consisting of bad one-liners. He responded to the ones that okcupid a sense with humor science displayed something interesting in their bios. Back when he was the pursuer, he'd swapped three to five messages to get a single date.

Now he'd send just one reply. Want to meet?

By date 20, dating noticed latent variables emerging. In the younger cluster, the women invariably had two or more tattoos and lived on the east side of Los Angeles. In the other, a disproportionate number owned midsize dogs that they adored. His okcupid dates were carefully planned. But as he worked feverishly through his queue, he resorted to casual afternoon meetups over lunch or coffee, often stacking two dates in a day.

No more drinking, for one. Dating the date when it's over, don't let it trail off. Sites with concerts or movies. McKinlay's code found that the women clustered into statistically identifiable groups who tended to with their OkCupid survey questions in similar ways. One group, which online dubbed science Greens, were online dating newbies; another, the Samanthas, tended to science older and more adventuresome. Here's how each for answered four of online most popular questions.

With night. A few months to a year. Several years. Okcupid rest of my life. As far as you're concerned, how long will it take before you have sex? Only after the wedding. Yes, and I enjoyed myself. Yes, and I did not enjoy myself.