Both men and women who enjoy a pint are 60 per cent more likely to sleep with someone early in a relationship, statistics show.

According to Christian Rudder, a Harvard graduate who set up dating website OKCupid, this applies to both gay and straight people.

After analysing the profiles and interactions of hundreds of millions of users, Rudder found that beer-drinking was the most useful indicator of whether people are likely to have casual sex, the Daily Mail reported.

Only the "beer test" works to predict a woman's possible interest in casual sex, according to theOKCupid data, but the site claimed these also work for men.

He also found the three questions that best predicted whether couples would actually go on to have a long-term relationship.

While many people thought the best questions to ask would be about someone's views on sex,smoking and God, he found that you could predict compatibility more than twice as well by asking these three questions:

1. Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?

2. Do you like horror movies?

3. Have you ever travelled around another country alone?

The data suggests that compatibility on sensation-seeking may be even more important than more obvious compatibility testers such a date's opinion on religion, sex, and smoking, observedPsychology Today.

The mathematics graduate also looked at how a woman's way of describing her body correlates with self-confidence and sex drive.

He discovered that a woman's sex drive rises dramatically till her late 30s, then drops just as dramatically, whereas her self-confidence steadily rises with age.

Women who said they were "curvy" were more interested in sex, and more self-confident, than women who said they were "skinny" - a trend that applies across all ages.

His blog also contains graphs that show that women who don't like exercise are twice as likely to have trouble achieving orgasm than women who do; that frequent tweeters have shorter real-life relationships than everyone else; and that people living in richer areas are more likely to want casual sex.