"They could see some new game-like Three Card Pai Gow Poker-then go home, write some code, and come up with a strategy to beat it." "They were capable of using mathematics in lots of different situations," he says. The experience kindled his interest in applied math, ultimately inspiring him to earn a master's and then a PhD in the field. Instead, he realized, he should be dating like a mathematician. He'd been approaching online matchmaking like any other user. 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. Most were ignored he'd gone on a total of six first dates. He'd sent dozens of cutesy introductory messages to women touted as potential matches by OkCupid's algorithms. McKinlay, a lanky 35-year-old with tousled hair, was one of about 40 million Americans looking for romance through websites like, J-Date, and e-Harmony, and he'd been searching in vain since his last breakup nine months earlier. (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. 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. 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.
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