An interesting read(why okcupid match system is flawed)

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http://isomorphismes.tumblr.com/post/13 ... -algorithm

This is an article from a mathematician and its based on mathematics, it explains in an excellent manner why okcupid match system is flawed.


TLDR version: there are plenty of questions that most people agree in(would you go out with someone that was already in a relationship?/ how would you react to cheating...).
Each of this questions has a value of 250 and several of this questions lead to a extremely high score. Take it that you answer 10 of this questions in the same way 25000/25000 if you get somewhat similar results in other questions you are going to be around the 80% or higher and if you happen to have opposite views you would still get a 50% match based on questions that according to the article shouldnt even be there because they cant be used to determine wether you´d be a good match or not.

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Last edited by nat4200 on 21 Apr 2012, 2:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

Any system to objectively assess a subjective behavior will be flawed to some degree.

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Last edited by nat4200 on 21 Apr 2012, 2:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

I agree with the OP, but this is not a huge problem. Generally, people on OkC don't take match percentages very seriously. I'm not going to see a 98% as better than a 95%, but I would look into things further if we had less than a 70% match.

Ya, some of those questions are real butt-nutters with no possible dating relevance. I really wonder what the people were thinking when they wrote them.

I think the biggest flaw is that you cannot filter messages by length. I think it would greatly improve the chances of people meeting if the women didn't have to sort through tons and tons of "Lets hook up" and the ilk.


The Questions do sometimes come across as very strange, and they aren't gender specific, so you get some really odd ones occasionally.

This is embarrassing...
could someone greatly-stupefy this article for me?



I like OKC's questions because you can mark their importance.
What part of the algorithm is being analyzed here, without getting too far into the author's methodology?

Don't see what he is going on about, his system can just be spammed too. Any system can be spammed, once you know how it works & his hotness scale is ilogical, as that would be thinking that everyone uses it the same.

You got to analyse the person yourself. I just go on Location, gender, age & read the profile. If I am interested I will send a email. Then I will start to analyse.

Basic human instincts denotes, stay away from any negative answering. Why would they want to decrease they chances. Unless they honest.

I suspect this is by design so that everyone get some matches.

I've been on the site for years. I've certainly found that the more questions I answer the better my matches. I also highlight (as a link) the important interests of mine. I've come to really trust OkCupid's suggestions for in the percentage rankings.

He's analyzing how "Mandatory" questions are worth waaaay more in terms of weight when computing match %. He says that by answering some "easy" questions like that marked as mandatory, it makes the match % artificially high, even if all the lesser questions (which actually may be of great importance) are answered differently. You could be completely incompatible with someone, but because you both answered questions like "Is the Earth bigger than the Sun" the same way and have it marked "Mandatory", you could still have 80% match or higher.

The problem is that I've found, at least in my area, is how many people skip those sorts of questions.. I can only hypothesis it's directly proportional to the number of people who are also "Christianity and very serious about it"

I thought the big problem was that answering the mandatory questions correctly was too many points for "showing up". Answering mandatory questions incorrectly should be reflected very negatively in the matching process.

I skip those sorts of questions because they are too obvious to be important to matching. Anyone who is at a high enough reading level to actually comprehend my profile knows the correct answer.

You are in California, I, however, am in the bible belt. Those questions are very important here.