Now he’d do the same for love
First he’d need data. While his dissertation work continued to run on the side, he set up 12 fake OkCupid accounts and wrote a Python script to manage them.
To find the survey answers, he had to do a bit of extra sleuthing. OkCupid lets users see the responses of others, but only to questions they’ve answered themselves. McKinlay set up his bots to simply answer each question randomly-he wasn’t using the dummy profiles to attract any of the women, so the answers didn’t matter-then scooped the women’s answers into a database. Continue Reading