The perfect online date? The numbers don't add up

Whether two people "click" cannot be forecast, according to a report. Photo / 123rf

By Sarah Knapton in London

Dating sites which claim to match couples based on complex algorithms do not work, as attraction cannot be predicted, a study has shown.

Although many dating apps and websites claim to have found the perfect formula for matching strangers, whether two people "click" cannot be forecast, according to the findings of the report in the journal Psychological Science.

To test whether it was possible to match couples based on traits such as extroversion, ambition, sense of humour, intelligence, political views or religious persuasion, scientists in the United States came up with 100 variables by which they rated 163 singles.

They sent the same men and women to a speed dating event to see if their original answers predicted who would hook up. They found that none did.

Professor Samantha Joel, of the University of Utah, said: "We found we cannot anticipate how much individuals will uniquely desire each other in a speed-dating context with any meaningful level of accuracy. I thought that out of more than 100 predictors, we would be able to predict at least some portion of the variance. I didn't expect we would find zero."

The team found it was possible to predict the overall tendency for someone to like and to be liked by others - but not which two people were a match.

"It may be that we never figure it out, that it is a property we can never get at because it is simply not predictable," said co-author Dr Paul Eastwick of the University of California, Davis. "Romantic desire may well be more like an earthquake, involving a dynamic and chaos-like process, than a chemical reaction involving the right combination of traits and preferences."