Why a ball full of animals?

What is FirstDate?

FirstDate is a GovTech pilot for single citizens aged 21 to 35. In this first trial it is open only to public officers, and applications close on 5 October 2026. Users sign in with Singpass and answer a questionnaire about their interests, habits, values and dealbreakers. One detailed write-up counts 33 questions in eight categories.

Instead of endless swiping, everyone gets one match per cycle, with a compatibility score, a short description and a personal note. Both people have 72 hours to accept, and contact details unlock only if both say yes. The platform then suggests “Date Quests” as icebreakers and sends a feedback survey afterwards. It pairs people using the Gale–Shapley stable marriage algorithm.

Singapore has tried state matchmaking before: the Social Development Unit started in 1984. FirstDate arrives as the country's fertility rate sits at about 0.87. It has critics too. One essay argues that a stable match isn't the same as a happy one, and that a questionnaire can confuse who you are with who you want.

How the algorithm works

1. Everyone on both sides ranks everyone on the other side.
2. Each unmatched person on the asking side proposes to their favourite among those who haven't rejected them yet.
3. Each receiver keeps the best offer so far as a “maybe” and rejects the others. If a better offer arrives later, they trade up.
4. Repeat until nobody on the asking side is both single and still has someone left to ask.

The result is always stable: there is no “rogue couple”, meaning no two people who would both rather be with each other than with their assigned partners. Nobody proposes to the same person twice, so with n people per side it needs at most n² proposals. That's fast enough to match tens of thousands of doctors in the US residency Match every spring.

Two surprises you can test on this site:

• The askers win. Every asker gets the best partner they could have in any stable matching, and every receiver gets the worst. Flip the switch on The Machine and compare.
• Only receivers can cheat. Askers can't do better by lying about their rankings, but receivers sometimes can, by turning down someone they'd honestly accept. Try it in Cheat the Machine.

A short history

• 1952: the US National Resident Matching Program starts using what is essentially this algorithm, without the theory behind it.
• 1962: David Gale and Lloyd Shapley publish “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage” in The American Mathematical Monthly and prove that a stable matching always exists.
• 1984: economist Alvin Roth shows the residency Match had been running Gale–Shapley all along.
• 2004: New York City switches high-school admissions to deferred acceptance. Before the switch, nearly half of students had no offer after three rounds. Afterwards, all but about 3,000 a year are placed.
• 2008: David Gale dies.
• 2012: Shapley and Roth receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.” Roth's work also shaped kidney exchange programmes.
• 2018: France's Parcoursup university-admissions platform launches, listed among the algorithm's applications.
• 2026: the largest US Main Residency Match on record offers 44,344 positions, 93.5% filled by the algorithm. In October, Singapore's FirstDate pilot opens.

What's on this site

• The Machine: a step-by-step animation of every proposal, rejection and trade-up, with “herd taste” and who-asks controls and a count of every stable matching on the ball.
• Play Cupid: 10 Matchmaker levels, the 60-second Rogue Hunt and 5 Cheat-the-Machine puzzles.
• Match Your Friends: run the algorithm on real names, with a shareable link and a downloadable certificate.
• Trivia: 10 questions from a pool of 24.

The guests, their names and bios are fictional and original. Their rankings are random, generated from a seed so that shared links show exactly the same ball. Nothing here is dating, relationship or life advice. A stable matching of animals is just maths.

Privacy

No accounts, trackers or servers. Stars, high scores, your theme choice and your last friend list are kept only in your browser's localStorage. Shared links carry their data in the URL itself.

Sources

• AsiaOne, “It's a match! GovTech rolls out dating pilot”: asiaone.com
• Singapore Samizdat, “How Singapore's government-run dating service FirstDate works”: singapore-samizdat.com
• Global Dating Insights, “Singapore Launches Government Dating Platform FirstDate”: globaldatinginsights.com
• Digital Today, Singapore pilots dating platform amid 0.87 fertility rate: digitaltoday.co.kr
• Wikipedia, Stable marriage problem: en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia, Gale–Shapley algorithm: en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia, David Gale: en.wikipedia.org
• NRMP, results of the 2026 Main Residency Match: nrmp.org
• AMS Feature Column, “The Stable Marriage Problem and School Choice”: ams.org
• NobelPrize.org, the Prize in Economic Sciences 2012: nobelprize.org

Credits

Concept, code, writing and illustrations are original to this site. Fonts: Fraunces, DM Sans and JetBrains Mono via Google Fonts. Emoji come from your device's system font. Built as a one-day site for 1 October 2026. Permanent home: dailyma.de/archive/2026-10-01.