Want to Know How ‘Are You the One?’ Ends? Reality TV Predictor Alex Wang Has Answers.

From ELLE

On a late Wednesday night in June, ten Democratic presidential candidates debated for the first time on television in front of a national audience. Tensions were high, and 15 million people watched with bated breath as questions ping-ponged between moderators and nominees. But Alex Wang, a 34-year-old from Boston, missed all that. Instead he was sitting in his living room, MacBook propped open on his lap, eyes glued to MTV, where the reality show Are You The One? premiered its eighth season. The software developer and amateur statistician typed away on his laptop to dispense crucial information to the hundreds of thousands of fans of his blog, "Are You The One? Math."

Wang, who debuted his blog back in 2014 to coincide with the very first season of AYTO?, has been following the hit reality show very closely ever since, diligently revealing to his followers the probable outcomes of each episode using an algorithm he's perfected over the years.

If you haven't seen the show, the premise is fairly simple: A predetermined number of singles gather in a gigantic mansion, Love Island-style. The difference, however—and what makes AYTO? one of the most unique reality-dating shows ever—is that each contestant gets secretly paired up into a couple by show runners via a matchmaking process. It's then up to the contestants to deduce who their "perfect match" is by the end of the season.

They either all figure it out and win up to $1 million, or they all lose and go home empty-handed. Clues are dropped during each episode, and couples can enter a “Truth Booth,” where they immediately find out if they’re a perfect match or not. During match-up ceremonies, it's revealed how many of the pairs are correct, but not which ones, represented by bright beams popping up in front of the contestants.

Essentially, each episode turns into a delicious and artful game of hookups and breakups to find your "perfect match." And it all hinges on a lot of strategy.

Which is precisely what Wang loves about the show: It's like Moneyball meets The Bachelorette. On his blog, Wang charts the probabilities of each romantic match, live-blogging during episodes. Every season, some 200,000 fans flock to his blog for predictions and real-time updates. As couples head into the Truth Booth, Wang is running the numbers, getting ready to hit publish the second the show announces a “Match” or “No Match.” Getting results up after a match-up ceremony takes a bit longer, but he still tries to publish the results within five minutes of the show’s announcement.

A Boston native, Wang has been dabbling in amateur sports analytics for about 10 years now. In 2006, he stumbled across something called “win probability,” a baseball statistic that focuses on the chance of a team winning a game at any point during the game. Wang became obsessed: He began looking at baseball in a whole new light, and even approached his fantasy sports teams through the same lens. (He wins his various leagues nearly every year.)

In 2011, he released a now-defunct app called Fantasy Playoff Predictor that could calculate your chances of winning your weekly fantasy football league. Then, when Wang heard about the premise of AYTO? before its debut five years ago, he realized he could apply that same analytical thinking to the show. “I thought the show had a lot of similarities to a game I played growing up as a child called Mastermind, and I thought it’d be fun to watch the show with predictive stats, which was similar to how I watch professional sports," he says.

Since its 2014 debut, AYTO? has had over 80 episodes and counting. Wang has watched every single one. Now, four episodes into the eighth season, he's pumped about the show’s latest twist. This year there are only 16 contestants—and there's a big catch: Every person in the house is sexually fluid, meaning they could partner with absolutely anyone. “There was definitely some talk in the fan community about the possibility of doing this [twist], and I’m glad they decided to go for it,” he says.

Essentially, he explains, the change shakes up the math—and leads to a lot more drama. “I think the math problem, at the highest level, is easier because they’ve got fewer combinations," he says. "For each individual person to actually find their match, you’ve got 15 possible people, and that’s really tough.”

While it took him a day or two to write the initial computer code for the first season, he had to start from scratch this time around, spending about four hours writing a new program. “I come up with all the possible combinations first, and then I have a computer program go through and check each individual match up and see, with everything we know, from all the truth booths and match-up ceremonies, is this [pairing] still allowed?” he explains. “Any person could do that themselves; it would just take a really, really long time.”

But when the mansion gets down to its final episodes, and they’re putting their heads together to ultimately solve the game, he assumes they’re using the same strategy. “It’s a little easier for them as a group of 16 or 20 or 22," he says, "where everyone can sort of remember, ‘I was coupled with this person in this one. Does this work or does this not work?’”

His strategy has also helped him predict whether a group will actually win a season or not. (Back in season 5, the contestants famously lost the show when they failed to find every perfect match.) In season 3, the cast had only two confirmed “perfect matches” and were only able to get up to three beams during a match-up ceremony during the entire season.

Yet, somehow, in the end, they were able to guess all the couples correctly, leading some to wonder if they didn’t get a bit of help from the producers of the show.

“There’s definitely a conspiracy theory about that,” Wang said. “Certainly, at the time, I was frustrated. It did feel like the right couples came out of nowhere.” He’s found through his blog that if his program can identify the matches before the season is over, then the house should be able to figure it out as well.

“If they remember everything correctly and walked through everything, they should be able to, no problem," he says. "In seasons 3, 5, and 7, there was no way of knowing exactly which couples were the right couples going into that last match-up ceremony. In season 3, they picked [the right couple] out of four [possible couples]… Certainly a lot of folks felt pretty suspicious about how the end came together.”

In the episodes leading up to the finale, Wang wrote on his blog, “If they win, it will be the biggest comeback ever... but, also, probably rigged?”

During tonight's show, it's too early for grand presumptions. Wang will be meeting a need, doing what the contestants—and most of the audience members—can't do on their own. But even he is aware of his limitations: When he blogs a new season, he cautions followers, "The math work here will be independent of the romance and excitement that comes with the pairings. Unless noted otherwise, assume the probabilities of a matchup here being successful are random, ignoring chemistry and all the parts of the show that are actually fun."

Watch Are You the One? on MTV on Wednesdays at 9 P.M. EST.

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