Public officers joining Government Technology Agency’s (GovTech) new dating pilot will not be matched with colleagues from the same government agency, the agency has said.
GovTech added that FirstDate is limited to public officers aged 21 to 35 because its team expected them to be “most likely to be actively dating and interested in trying the service”.
Keeping the pilot within a defined age range will also allow the team to test the product with a more focused group of users, it said on Thursday.
Originating from GovTech Singapore’s annual hackathon, the FirstDate is a pilot being tested with unmarried public officers.
It was not commissioned by another government agency, GovTech said.
Public officers have until Oct 5 to sign up for the programme, with the matching process to begin after that.
“No decision has been made on whether to launch or expand FirstDate beyond the pilot stage,” GovTech said.
The agency said the FirstDate team was curious about the challenges people face when meeting someone new and explored whether a different approach could help.
“They wanted to test whether placing greater emphasis on shared values and preferences, with fewer matches at a time, could encourage users to give each introduction more consideration,” it said.
FirstDate uses questionnaire responses and the Gale-Shapley Stable Marriage algorithm to pair participants, with users receiving one match at a time.
Developed by two mathematicians in 1962, the algorithm is designed to produce stable matches between two groups based on their preferences. It has been applied to match doctors to hospital residencies and students to public schools.
Separately, in 2019, NUS undergraduates came up with the Aphrodite Project, which also uses the same algorithm and a questionnaire to match students.
This platform, which has since been made available for free to students and alumni from over 10 universities worldwide, says on its website that it has matched more than 107,000 people to date.
About two in five met their assigned match in person, and 14 engagements and marriages have been recorded so far. — The Straits Times/ANN
