Mathematician Chris McKinlay hacks OkCupid and finds his wife

AN AMERICAN math genius hacked dating site OkCupid after being fed up with its suggestions and eventually found his wife.

Chris McKinlay and his now fiancee Christine Tien Wang. Picture: Supplied

A MATH genius from a US university used his skills to hack the dating site OkCupid and found his wife.

35-year-old, Chris McKinlay told Wired that he had got sick of the crappy compatibility suggestions that OkCupid had come up for him, so he decided to take things into his own hands and started to try dating "like a mathematician".

The system, McKinlay worked out only gave him suggestions for women who answered exactly the same questions as him in the online survey. So to counter this, the UCLA student created up to 12 fake OkCupid accounts and wrote a script to manage them.

The script then searched through his target demographics for exactly what he wanted in a partner, and since he had programmed the bots so that between them all, each question in the survey had an answer, he was then able to see all the women in his area to pick from.

He eventually got caught out by OkCupid, but by the time he did, McKinlay had already got all the data he needed and found his true love.

After narrowing down his 20,000 potential partners, he ended up going on 87 dates before finding his soon-to-be wife, Christine on the 88th.

They ate sushi and walked around a sculpture garden on their first date, and something clicked. When he revealed his secret hacking abilities, Wang was weirded out at all. She was intruiged.

"I thought it was dark and cynical," she said. "I liked it."

While most people wouldn't be able to replicate McKinlay's complex computer trickery, he says what he did is just a large scale version of what normally happens when people use online dating sites.

McKinlay adds that it wasn't maths that made their relationship a success.

"It was just a mechanism to put us in the same room. I was able to use OkCupid to find someone."

"People are much more complicated than their profiles," said Wang. "So the way we met was kind of superficial, but everything that happened after is not superficial at all. It's been cultivated through a lot of work."

Though if you want to try and replicate McKinley's success, you can pick up a copy of his book on his OkCupid experience, title Optimal Cupid: Mastering the Hidden Logic of OkCupid, which helps people get the most out of the dating site.

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