Big data, savior for China's love seekers?

BEIJING - A very special picture hangs on the wall of Xiaofei's new home in Shenzhen, Southeast China's Guangdong province. The newly-married engineer has framed a screenshot of the dialog he had with Aibi - now his wife - in a browser game five years ago.

The game brought Xiaofei, who was then studying in Leipzig, Germany, together with Aibi, who was then working in China. The two fell in love and Xiaofei later returned to China to be with her.

While Xiaofei and Aibi believe their marriage was made in heaven, Xia Tianyu hears such stories everyday in Huatian Community, an online dating company affiliated with Chinese Internet giant Netease. Xia, Huatian's general manager, and his 30-strong team are trying to decrypt the puzzle of love with the help of big data.

"This is a typical case of behavioral analysis leading to specific demand," he says. In Xiaofei's case, the game provided a dialog channel for people with similar traits, such as hobbies, personalities and ways of expression. If man and woman with matching indices happen to be single and looking for a partner, their online conversation will result in "specific demand" - a meeting, perhaps a date and whatever comes next....

Xia, an Oracle and database management expert, believes that all things seemingly unpredictable and subjective, such as love, can be measured by big data. This includes "hard indices" like age, height, weight, income and educational background, as well as "soft indices" like language, personality, social preferences, reading preferences, time spent online and even zodiac signs.

Liu Cixin, one of China's most celebrated sci-fi writers, also believes big data can help people find their other half. "I once read an article saying that every person on Earth can, in theory, fall in love with 600,000 others. It sounds amazing, but how many of the 600,000 will the person actually meet? Very few, I think.

"Big data can pick out potential dating pairs from a very large pool, which is more accurate than traditional match-making, and give them chance to meet and communicate," Liu says.

United States mathematician Christopher McKinlay reportedly used big data in his own - arguably not very romantic - quest for love.

AFP reported that McKinlay opened several accounts on the dating site OKCupid, and pulled out 6 million questionnaire answers from 20,000 registered women. He wrote programs to pick out 5,000 active users and narrowed the pool down by indices suitable for marriage.