Want to find true love in 90 days? There's a computer hacking program for that.
Chris McKinlay, a math wiz with a Ph.D., found a way to manipulate dating website OkCupid's compatibility matching system to find the woman best suited for him, the New York Daily News reported.
It worked, and now the 35-year-old is getting married to 28-year-old Christine Tien Wang.
"I think that what I did is just a slightly more algorithmic, large-scale and machine-learning-based version of what everyone does on the site," McKinlay said in an interview with Wired magazine.
McKinlay, who studied math at UCLA, first signed up for OkCupid in June 2012. McKinlay found out he was only compatible with less than 100 women out of the thousands of profiles available. After six lousy dates, McKinlay wondered if he could use math to ease his search for love.
McKinlay was able to come up with the idea thanks to his experience counting cards with a professional blackjack team.
"They were capable of using mathematics in lots of different situations," McKinlay told Wired. "They could see some new game...then go home, write some code and come up with a strategy to beat it."
McKinlay created 12 fake OkCupid profiles and programed them to randomly answer compatibility questions. This allowed McKinlay to monitor the answers of all of the women on the site, according to the Daily News.
The search yielded 6 million answers from 20,000 possible matches, which McKinlay then narrowed down using an algorithm to pick out women based in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
"I was ecstatic," McKinlay told Wired. "That was the high point of June."
McKinlay ended up with the profiles of over 10,000 women he was compatible with. With his final search- an indie-type woman, like a musician or artist, in her mid-twenties- he found the one, Wired reported.
After 87 dates, McKinlay met Wang, an art student at UCLA, 90 days after McKinlay first started his search.
"It's not like, we matched and therefore we have a great relationship," McKinlay told Wired. "It was just a mechanism to put us in the same room. I was able to use OkCupid to find someone."
"You didn't find me," Wang corrected McKinlay. "I found you."
