Chris McKinlay
Chris McKinlay
Chris McKinlay is a software engineer with a PhD in applied mathematics. He is well known for hacking OkCupid's matching system to make himself the most eligible user on the site. [1]
Education
Career
OkCupid
"I Hacked OkCupid"
In 2014 McKinlay was profiled by Wired for his unconventional online dating strategy in an article called "How A Math Genius Hacked OkCupid To Find True Love". OkCupid's matching algorithm had left him with fewer than 100 eligible options from a city with 80,000 OkCupid users. So McKinlay decided he would have to game the system. He set up 12 OkCupid accounts and wrote a script to manage them and scrape the profiles of his target demographic for every scrap of available information. Since OkCupid only lets users see others' responses if they've answered the questions themselves, McKinlay began harvesting answer data using his bots. OkCupid began banning the bots so McKinlay had to figure out how to train them to seem human. [undefined]
At this point McKinlay called up his neuroscientist buddy Sam Torrisi and together they developed a more human seeming bot and let it run 24 hours a day. The experiment yielded 6 million questions and answers from over 20,000 eligible women. McKinlay began looking for patterns in the data, coding up a modified Bell Labs algorithm called K-Modes he was able to divide the data into 7 distinct clusters. After culling the data into two clusters that really appealed to him, McKinlay started appearing at a 90%+ match for thousands of profiles. McKinlay wrote a final script that visited the page of each profile that matched his, thus sending them a notification and putting him on their radar. After that, the messages started flooding in.
The results weren't immediate, he still had to make the actual connection.
However, McKinlay fell in love with Christine Tien Wang on his 88th date.