Zhang Yiming, founder of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Imaginechina Limited/Alamy

SINGAPORE—Zhang Yiming chose a college by calculating which schools were far from home and had a favorable female-to-male ratio for finding love. He bought his first home by devising a formula to identify Beijing’s best community. 

And he became China’s richest person after creating TikTok, the massively popular app built around an algorithm that predicts the videos people would enjoy based on their previous activity.

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