On Fri, 02 May 2003 10:16:21 +1000, Tim Starling ts4294967296@hotmail.com gave utterance to the following:
From: Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com
On Thu, 2003-05-01 at 08:53, Nick Reinking wrote:
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any simple mathematical way
to
do want you want to do. (that being making articles selected randomly less likely to be selected randomly over time)
Not sure who wants to do that... For me it's quite sufficient to make the probability of selection random, and let the size of the selection field make multiple selections _reasonably_ rare.
With over 100,000 articles, it's unlikely the user will ever see the same article come up twice. A previous flawed algorithm had the property of making a few articles much more likely to be selected.
I thought the reason we were having this discussion was because articles were repeating too often, indicating some fault in the randomizer? I have commonly seen an article twice in a sequence of 3 -5 random page requests - about a dozen times in the past month. On one occasion I saw an article 3 times in a sequence of 6. Which is definitely not statistically random.