Valentine's app for love

Initially only available to students from the University, the creators hope to roll it out the rest of the country very soon.

The app has been based on psychological research from the university, and now ENTWINE, is the app designed instantly to predict intuitive attraction between people, before they have even met.

Originally created by Dr Roland Baddeley and Dr Felix Mercer Moss from the University's School of Experimental Psychology, the platform asks users to evaluate three different 'selfies' of their potential date.

Dr Baddeley said: "The key to a successful match is to be found not in explicit answers to specific questions about, for instance, likes and dislikes or a yes-no response to a photo, but in a combination of your explicit and implicit responses - measured by the way you swipe your finger on the screen."

Dr Mercer Moss added: "Analysis of these three swipes, compared to other conventional online dating approaches, provides a richer and more predictive representation of how someone feels about another person.”

He continued: "It may or may not find the love of your life, but will hopefully reduce the number of dates where you know within the first ten seconds that this is not going to work, and spend the evening waiting until it is polite to say thanks but no thanks."

As well as boosting chances of finding romance, there is also a scientific side to ENTWINE.

Machine-learning techniques will be used to help the university gain a better understanding of how we evaluate other potential partners and shed more light on the poorly-understood but universally-recognised Darwinian problem of who we choose to pair-up and continue the species with.

Any student with a University of Bristol email account can sign up to the app through the Apple App Store by searching for Entwine or visiting this web address.