Singapore's government dating app utilizes a Nobel Prize-winning game theory algorithm.
FirstDate employs the Gale-Shapley algorithm, originally developed in 1962 for stable marriages, which earned a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012 and is still used today for matching hospital residents and kidney exchanges.
How it works:
- Your preferences and dealbreakers create a ranked priority list.
- Proposers offer to their top choice. Receivers keep their best offer and reject others. Rejected proposers move down their list. This repeats until matches are finalized.
- The outcome is mathematically stable: no two individuals exist who would both prefer each other over their assigned partners. The possibility of "the app never showed us each other" is eliminated by design.
The user experience:
- One match per cycle, no infinite scrolling.
- A 72-hour decision window.
- Contact information is revealed only upon mutual acceptance.
- Singpass verification ensures all users are who they claim to be (I told my husband I'm annoyed I can't test it. His response: most people sneak onto dating apps, and here you are openly filing a product research request 🤣).
Commercial apps aim to keep you swiping, but this app is designed to encourage you to leave the platform. Singapore has created the first dating app whose success is measured by its users deleting the app 💀.
(An interesting game theory note: Gale-Shapley results in proposer-optimal outcomes, meaning proposers achieve their best possible stable match, while receivers get their worst.)
Currently, it is available only to public servants aged 21-35. It will be interesting to see if state-sponsored game theory can outperform the free market (or rather, all the Tinders and Hinge apps out there) 🍿.
