Stanford University in the United States is being pulled by an invisible "technological gravity" - every Tuesday at 9 p.m., more than 5,000 undergraduates open an AI blind date software called Date Drop on time, waiting for the algorithm to "send" a match.Date Drop was written by Henry Weng, a Chinese graduate student at Stanford, in about three weeks.Users need to answer 66 multiple-choice questions involving values, lifestyles and political stances, and the system will match them with suitable candidates.
The results "drop" on time every Tuesday at 9pm. This has become a campus ritual: students who are successfully matched often go to a cafe called On Call, which provides free drinks to students who bring their first matched pair of the quarter to go on a date; those who are dissatisfied with the result will bluntly say on the anonymous forum: "My match is too ugly."
Founder Weng said that the original intention of this software is to "help people seize the opportunity to connect": "You have a reason to meet a specific person, and there is less pressure." With a background in computer science, he uses technology to open a door for social dilemmas.
This is exactly what happens to many Stanford students. Sophomore Alaina Zhang said frankly: "Many people here place great emphasis on academic or career success, and social interaction is put on hold. Even daily conversations are not easy, let alone romantic interactions."
Princeton freshman Pierre Du Plessis feels the same way—it’s “extremely unusual” to ask someone out on his campus: “If it goes wrong, everyone knows. You don’t want to be famous for being embarrassed.” A generation tired of real-life social interaction and trapped by endless scrolling on dating apps is looking for an outlet in the algorithm.
now,Date Drop has grown from a campus project to a commercial entity, expanding to ten universities including Columbia, Princeton, and MIT, and has just completed $2.1 million in venture financing.
As early as 2017, The Marriage Pact project developed by another team at Stanford has entered more than 100 colleges and universities, and has facilitated more than 350,000 matches and dozens of marriages.
Its questionnaire, designed by a team of relationship scientists, involves value judgments such as "would rather fail than cheat on a test." In November last year, The Marriage Pact team sent a cease-and-desist letter to Date Drop, saying its issues were too similar to its marketing methods.
Ong responded that the team would stick to the product and continue operations. In fact, campus self-study matching projects have a long history: Harvard Computer Society launched Datamatch in 1994; Cornell has Perfect Match; Dartmouth has Last Chances, which allows seniors to submit the names of their crushes and wait for them to come in both directions.