Referred to inside the company as an “Elo score,” a term the chess world uses to rank player skill levels, Tinder’s rating system helps it parse its user base in order to facilitate better matches.

Using the system, Tinder could, say, surface more potential dates based on score compatibility.

Smiley face emojis work unexpectedly well online - indeed, people who use emojis apparently have more sex.

We found that people are in many ways predictable in their dating habits but they also often bend their own rules.But to me, and likely most Tinder users, it’s hard not to perceive the rating as a definitive scoring of our attractiveness, a supercharged Hot or Not-style algorithm culled from thousands and thousands of signals. And if the company did, would you even want to know it? Rad, who tells me his Elo score is “above average,” stresses that the rating is technically not a measure of attractiveness, but a measure of “desirability,” in part because it’s not determined simply by your profile photo.“It’s not just how many people swipe right on you,” Rad explains. It took us two and a half months just to build the algorithm because a lot of factors go into it.”He doesn’t go into too much detail, but it’s easy to imagine how many data points could make up your “desirability” score.The Conversation UK receives funding from Hefce, Hefcw, SAGE, SFC, RCUK, The Nuffield Foundation, The Ogden Trust, The Royal Society, The Wellcome Trust, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The Alliance for Useful Evidence, as well as sixty five university members.View the full list If it seems as if everyone you know is online dating, you’re not alone.