It’s undeniable that in this age of technology, almost everything can be done much easier and faster than before. You can now contact friends, read the news, and share your talents and skills, among others, online. But perhaps a big leap in the social construct with the help of innovation is how people find love nowadays.
Through websites or apps, you can easily find people who have the same interests, hobbies, and outlooks in life as you do. Just sign up, fill out the form add some of your attractive photos, voila! You are bound to meet a potential partner after a few swipes or clicks.
An algorithm does its job to match you with another person depending on the stuff you put on the website or app.
However, this system often fails. Online dating sites and apps may be the best shortcuts in searching for “the one”, but it will take you several tries to be able to arrive to that one person because there are important factors disregarded by the present algorithms in use.
For that, you waste time, effort and energy in the process. You know what I’m talking if you have tried a couple of these online dating services.
This ordeal is supported by a study commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science which reveals that dating algorithms have no better a success rate than meeting someone at a bar. But it’s better to try than not at all, right?
Perhaps the problem lies on the matching of the persons. Because what the algorithm usually does is pair up profiles based on the idealized versions of the people behind it. Or maybe it all boils down to the fact that the online dating sites or apps are not asking the right questions for matchmaking.
This has got Rashied Amini, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory systems engineer, concerned and went on to develop Nanaya, which is a dating site with a certain promise: that is to “predict the future of your love life” according to science, algorithms, and big data.
“For me, it’s a lot of fun to reverse engineer how the matching algorithms work across different sites, whether it’s OkCupid, eHarmony, or Chemistry,” he tells the Daily Dot.
Amini says he tried OkCupid when he moved to Los Angeles but there is little to no luck in meeting new people. He added that he hasn’t used dating sites for much beyond research.
He believes that online dating service’s method of personality analysis and matchmaking are unique to each other with pros and cons. Curious on how it works, he studied them and made one on his own, coming up with “something more robust that integrates personality testing and live values”.
There came Nanaya. It is an online dating site, or a personality test as how its creator prefers to call it, that takes into consideration outside variables usually not taken into account by similar platforms. It scientifically predicts the future of your love life and report personalized data to help you build romantic and social ties. All it takes is answering a short, user-adaptive questionnaire and personality test.
“Nanaya doesn’t perform matchmaking like other sites. We will ‘matchmake’ people with cities and groups of people, which is fundamentally new.
“Matchmaking looks at a couple. Nanaya looks at the couple and everything that romantically affects their lives,” Amini cites. “Because Nanaya looks beyond the couple to analyze the whole system and how user psychology impacts a long-term behavior and happiness, [we] think Nanaya will provide far more accurate outcomes.”
What Amini refers to is that Nanaya doesn’t tell you directly that there is “the one” but instead offers match suggestions based on your there are likely many people who may be an ideal fit. The app is designed to determine what the optimal situation is for a user to find a successful relationship.
Users can sign up with Nanaya through their website for a mere $4.99. If you do that, you are helping the algorithm become smarter as the algorithm gets more accurate.
But how did Amini come up with this groundbreaking online dating idea? From a heartbreak.
