- If you're not familiar
with the Tinder Mobile app,
I'll fill you in.
[bass thumping beat]
You create a profile and
the app shows you pictures of other users
who are geographically close to you.
If the person's picture
doesn't do anything for you,
ya swipe left but,
if you like what you see, ya swipe right.
If you swipe right on
someone and she or he
swipes right on your profile,
you can send each other
messages to get things started.
But, what if you have a particular type?
Like, say I'm a single guy
looking for a women with
Lord of the Rings tattoos,
red hair worn in a pixie cut,
and green eyes.
Well, that's pretty specific and
Tinder is likely to send
me a lot of pictures that
don't interest me.
So, in my case I'd be swiping left a lot.
That gets tiresome.
Enter computer scientist Harm de Vries,
who experienced a similar issue
while trying to find a
good match on Tinder.
He's a DIY kind of guy and
decided it might make sense to develop
an artificially intelligent
machine learning program
that could help curate profiles
more to his personal taste.
de Vries supplied his
program with more than
7000 profile pictures to
train it on his preferences
and then another couple
thousand to test it.
But, as it turns out the
rules of attraction require
a bit more data than a
sample of less than 10000.
He then turned the tech up to
11 by supplying 500000 photos
of both men and women from OK Cupid.
This helped him teach the
program to recognize everything
from gender to various physical
traits, like hair color.
Putting it to the test, de
Vries discovered the program
had a 68 percent success
rate in curating pictures
he'd find appealing, which
he views as a good start.
As a sort of control,
de Vries asked a friend,
who knows his preferences,
to try sorting a random sample and they
only did a little better,
a 76 percent success rate.
So, what does this mean for Tinder?
The company could incorporate
a program like this into its'
premium service to create
another incentive for
people to subscribe rather
than using the free version.
And beyond Tinder, software
like this could be used
with tons of services to
cater more to the individual
users preference.
Well that's it for today.
Do you think A.I. selecting
profiles for you is cool or
creepy? Let me know in the comments.
If you enjoyed this video make sure you
hit that little like
button to let us know.
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