On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 2:15 AM, effe iets anderseffeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
What about changing it every hour? Then you have sufficient randomness over time, and no flashy buttons.
You still have the problem that peoples response to future buttons will depend on the past buttons they've seen.
Yeah, I'd suggest it is better to show each person one button type and stick with it.
One can approximate that behavior either by assigning each user randomly and tracking their type via a cookie or by selecting based on higher order bytes in the IP address and assuming those are fairly stable (e.g. using BBB mod 4 where the address is AAA.BBB.CCC.DDD).
Neither approach is foolproof or totally without bias, but one can do fairly well.
-Robert Rohde