Singapore’s digital transformation agency, GovTech, is piloting a dating app. GovTech says the app came about after discussions among its staff, who apparently “shared an interest in exploring some of the challenges people can face when meeting someone new.” “They wondered whether a different approach that places greater emphasis on compatibility through values and preferences, and offers fewer matches at a time, could give users more space to consider each introduction and decide whether they would like to take the next step.”
The staffers took those ideas to GovTech’s annual hackathon, and the result was “FirstDate,” billed as “An initiative to support singles aged 21-35 in their dating journey.” The app asks users to complete a questionnaire that GovTech says “covers users' interests, habits, values and preferences to curate matches based on compatibility.” “Once completed, leave the matching to us,” the agency urges.
That’s not strictly true because the app applies the Gale-Shapley Stable Matching algorithm, a method that imagines a group of people hoping to pair off in some way. In the 1962 paper [PDF] that proposes the algorithm, the authors offer the following scenario: “A certain community consists of n men and n women. Each person ranks those of the opposite sex in accordance with his or her preferences for a marriage partner.
We seek a satisfactory way of marrying off all members of the community … if under it there are a man and a woman who are not married to each other but prefer each other to their actual mates.” The algorithm aims to produce stable relationships by sifting all participants’ preferences to find viable couples. It’s not perfect, by any means, but is widely used in economics.
Readers who imagine that algorithmic matching can’t replace the mysteries of romance may wish to note that the OECD ranks Singaporean high school students as the world’s second-most proficient at mathematics. GovTech, however, allows that the algorithm can’t “guarantee chemistry or a match leading to a relationship.” The app operates on a 72-hour cycle, during which users will see info about one person the algorithm suggests they might find interesting.
If both participants agree, the app reveals contact details. “Take it from there, reach out and get chatting!” GovTech urges.
“If you do meet up, try our Date Quests to break the ice.” Date Quests are suggested activities for a first date. For now, the app is only available to single members of Singapore’s civil service.
There’s no word on when or if Singapore might decide on wider release and take on Tinder, or grapple with Grindr. GovTech’s most famous app before FirstDate was probably TraceTogether, which used smartphones’ Bluetooth radios to track people during the COVID-19 pandemic in the hope of identifying people who had been exposed to the virus. Singaporean authorities used the app to contact those at risk of infection, and requred them to enter isolation to slow the spread of the virus.
TraceTogether, and similar apps deployed around the world, mostly flopped. It’s unclear why Singapore has decided to test this app however one of the island nation’s five shared values is “Family as the basic unit of society.” That’s more than a platitude: a program called Made for Families offers grants to purchase housing, funding for pre-natal care, and tax rebates for parents.
Those incentives haven’t prevented Singapore’s birth rate from falling to record lows. Singapore is not the first jurisdiction to try this sort of thing: the City of Tokyo did likewise in 2024.
Originally published at theregister.com
