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Nowadays, it’s quite common for people to meet each other online and start a romantic relationship that way. There are a number of dating websites and apps that help out in those endeavors, but they’re in no way almighty. To find the perfect match on websites like OK Cupid.com sometimes you have to spend a colossal amount of time, creating a profile that hits all the right notes and attracts the right kind of a girl. Well, one math expert decided to hack his way out of this problematic experience and cheat the whole dating system. Take a look at his story.
Who Is Chris McKinlay?
Well, back in 2012, Chris McKinlay was just a brilliant math student at the UCLA working hard on his PhD dissertation, trying to realize himself as a proper scientist. Like many other people in the USA focused solely on their work, he didn’t have time to go out, mingle and meet some new people, which is why he placed his hopes in online dating websites like the OK Cupid.com. This rather popular platform allowed people to find their perfect matches based on mutual interests and detailed surveys they needed to fill out. However, for Chris, this was all in vain. He didn’t get enough matches and went on just 6 dates. Needless to say, they all failed catastrophically.
Hacking OK Cupid.com
Obviously, Chris couldn’t make peace with such failure and his mathematical mind automatically started to look for bugs in the website’s system. Somehow, the system wasn’t working for him and he needed to find out why, so he started doing what he did best – hacking. Namely, the matching system worked like this – all of the users on the website were asked a series of personal questions and then asked to assess the importance of these things in their lives. Based on those two parameters, the website made the matches, but they didn’t really work as planned. So, Chris decided to take the matters into his own hands and hack the system.
The Process
To be able to crack the system, Chris created dozens of fake profiles that collected thousands of female responses and sorted them out. This would become a basis for his project. If he found out all the female preferences, he could adjust his real profiles to be more compelling and attractive to them. However, it didn’t go as smooth as he had planned. OK Cupid staff knows how to deal with these kinds of bots, so they suspended all of his fake accounts. Instead of giving up, Chris simply got in touch with his neuroscientist friend who also had a profile on this platform and made the bots learn his behavior online to appear more human. This is how he compiled a lot of useful information that helped him set up more appropriate profiles. He wrote a script that automatically viewed thousands of profiles, sending out notifications to each one.
The Selection
In the end, it all came down to two groups of women he liked and his two corresponding profiles. On the one hand, there were women in their mid-twenties, mainly artists and free spirits, which Chris quite liked. In the other group, there were somewhat older women with professional but creative careers. Although he was rather confident in his programming skills and mathematical calculations, he really didn’t expect to find so many replies. Before this, he had to send out hundreds of messages and he would rarely get any reply, let alone a date. After this, the women were reaching out to him first and all he had to do was agree to dates. However, that is when he realized the true problem of okcupid dating. Regardless of all the calculations, hacks and cheats, you still had to actually go out and look for the perfect match yourself. Chris confessed to having gone on about 80 dates, rarely reaching the second or third date with the same person. He felt rather disillusioned by it all.
True Love
However, just when he was losing all hope, he received a message from Christine Tien-Wang, an artist of 28. Skeptical at first, Chris went on a date with her and took her around the campus. It was his 88th try, but it seemed to have worked because they simply hit it off. The two discussed art extensively and immediately knew they were right for each other. She even liked the fact that he had gone through so much trouble to find a soul mate. Although the story does end on a high note, it’s still a question whether it’s for everyone. Chris had done through a lot of trouble only to realize that the only way to find a date is to actually look for it. There are really no shortcuts.
At the end of this somewhat peculiar okcupid review, we can only conclude that dating websites can be quite useful as a starting point, but you still need to do the legwork yourself. Have you tried OK Cupid.com? What are your thoughts on it?
