Chris McKinlay was just like thousands of other graduate students. He spent most of his nights chiseling away at his PhD thesis—an arcane treatise on large-scale data processing with supercomputers—living on a couple hundred dollars per month, sleeping in his cramped cubicle, and scrolling listlessly through online dating sites in search of love or, at least, a worthwhile diversion.
That is, until he hacked OkCupid.
McKinlay, frustrated by months of online dating with meager results, began to think about the complex algorithms that OkCupid uses to match compatible users. “The first thing I did was gather a lot of data from OkCupid and mine all that data for patterns,†he told NOVA. But McKinlay’s passing interest in collecting OkCupid data soon evolved into an obsession. “I started using all of my supercomputing time analyzing OkCupid match question data.â€
Within a matter of months, the unassuming 35-year-old math whiz was the top match for more than 30,000 women on OkCupid. He was receiving ...
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