• Hacker un site de rencontre pour contourner l’algorithme qui est censé présenter les bonnes personnes. D’où l’on remarque (rien de nouveau) que bien que ces sites roulent, et font de la pub sur leur mécanisme, leur réelle valeur ajoutée se situent dans la communauté qu’ils rassemblent ; ce qui peut amener à se demander où se situe la masse critique qui fait passer l’attrait du site de l’un à l’autre (question sans réponse).
    D’où aussi une interrogation sur le degré d’activité qui est attendu de l’usager du site (il est pourtant question de « chercher l’amour »), et surtout le niveau d’activité : le site est un produit fini, avec un système de défense qui empêche de descendre dans la structure ou même de repérer les récurrences.
    A part ça, belle ironie ou absence de retour critique, le journaliste place quand même « He’d already decided he would fill out his answers honestly—he didn’t want to build his future relationship on a foundation of computer-generated lies. »

    #dating #OKCupid #hacking #maths_appliquées

    How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love - Wired Science
    http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/all

    Chris McKinlay was folded into a cramped fifth-floor cubicle in UCLA’s math sciences building, lit by a single bulb and the glow from his monitor. It was 3 in the morn­ing, the optimal time to squeeze cycles out of the supercomputer in Colorado that he was using for his PhD dissertation. (The subject: large-scale data processing and parallel numerical methods.) While the computer chugged, he clicked open a second window to check his OkCupid inbox.

    McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like Match.com, J-Date, and e-Harmony, and he’d been searching in vain since his last breakup nine months earlier. He’d sent dozens of cutesy introductory messages to women touted as potential matches by OkCupid’s algorithms. Most were ignored; he’d gone on a total of six first dates.

    On that early morning in June 2012, his compiler crunching out machine code in one window, his forlorn dating profile sitting idle in the other, it dawned on him that he was doing it wrong. He’d been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician.