Singapore's Government Dating App Runs on a Nobel Prize-Winning Algorithm
Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm
Singapore's FirstDate, a pilot dating app for public servants aged 21–35, uses the Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm—the 1962 game theory method that won the 2012 Economics Nobel. Users rank preferences, receive one match per cycle with a 72-hour decision window, and contact info is revealed only on mutual yes. Singpass verification ensures authenticity. The app's success metric is deleting its own users.
Singapore built the first dating app whose success metric is deleting its own users
- slybot
This is very interesting from pairwise comparison perspective. Infact, humans are better at pairwise preference scoring rather than estimating a score from single input [1]. In regular dating apps, the profiles are presented one by one which makes it more recurrent comparison based on the experience rather than in pairs.
In the news, it is not detailed but what would be interesting is to profiling automatically, given a somewhat larger pool of participants. Where certain number of pairs during the setup is presented to the new user and asked to make pairwise choices to build the preference profile over.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016816992...
- purplepatrick
Cute. Of course, beyond basic deal breakers, neither do people know their preferences (but they think they do), nor do the majority of preference categories actually matter.
This is a common problem with all dating apps. Specifically, interests, hobbies, daily routines, objectives, etc. have nothing to do with compatibility.
“We like the same things!” is the compatibility signal of a naive 22-yr old…
- daymanstep
To run gale shapley you need a fully ordered full list ranked by preference. If you have 10K people, asking every person to fully order a list of 10K items is not practical.
Whatever they're running, it's not gale shapley.
- samiv
All dating apps are misclassified. They should be under contraceptives.
The same problem on every platform. 80% men and few women who get so picky that most men will never reach their standards.
I fear for most young men dating is over. And I fear what will happen when societies have large swathes of men with no connection to society, no jobs, no friends, no wives, no families.
- janalsncm
In principle this can be a lot better than regular dating apps.
Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app. In fact they are incentivized not to make matches that lead to marriage, because then you will stop paying.
The government knows whether you got married and stayed married, and given the social cost of divorce, they are pretty incentivized to keep people married.
- abeppu
So on the one hand it's nice to see when a cool algorithm or framework is used IRL.
On the other hand, actually applying a 'stable marriage algorithm' to people makes a bunch of assumptions which are worth interrogating:
- Do people actually know what they want even in the short term?
- Do people's preference change meaningfully over longer periods of time?
- Does your preference _upon reading people's profiles_ have any strong relationship to your preference after spending any amount of time with them?
The property that right after being matched, no one could have matched with someone whose profile they preferred more does not mean that this will create stable relationships.
- jaredsia
It's funny how the govt in Singapore tries to control and subtly orchestrate everything. from (i) mandating the racial quotas across Chinese, Malay, Indian, in each block of public housing; to (ii) only providing huge housing subsidies to couples while discriminating the singles, to (iii) giving out S$70k in baby bonuses (from birth to 17), and (iv) banning vaping while convincing citizens its not an infringement of civil liberties. I mean many policies are smart and I agree with many of them, but there is a line between human freedoms and govt overreach.
- qihqi
Depending on the which gender does the initiation; the result is either male optimal (males get the best he can get, females gets the worst among those she would tolerate) or female optimal. I wonder which version this one is.
- asphodele
It's difficult to get animals in captivity to mate, as environmental stressors affect them physiologically or they instictively know that conditions aren't right for raising offspring.
Applies to people as well in many developed societies.
- aeontech
I really liked this analysis - it echoes a lot of the comments here - to wit, as an engineer it's tempting to think that this is an engineering problem, but the program might get better results from funding third spaces and events and letting people match by what they want to do, not by what they think they may like in a person. https://www.singapore-samizdat.com/p/how-singapores-governme...