Everyone you know has an online dating profile, and if they say they don’t, they are lying to you. We can poke fun at it all we want, but there’s actually a mathematical formula behind it.
In this video, one of OkCupid’s founders, Christian Rudder, explains how his site’s matching algorithm works. When two people join the site, of course their shared interests are taken into account. But these internet romance mathematicians look at that as data, which they crunch through some equations to hopefully find you someone you’ll like.
Sure, attraction is abstract, but as far as OkCupid is concerned, either your next random hookup or your lifelong match could be found by running some numbers. [TED-Ed]