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by oregon on August 7th, 2006

oregon

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Is the "Answer a Question" scroll box truly random?

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  • by Christopher Woods on August 7th, 2006

    Christopher Woods

    I believe it may well be, as the box seems to employ Ajax to source its contents - it would almost be too much hassle to code an algorithm to pick questions in a particular order, as opposed to just using any server-side language's built-in 'random' function to truly randomly pick questions from the database (I expect that the code just takes all of the question entries' ID numbers in the database and picks at random any number between the first and last entries).


    Of course, whether a computer can ever truly perform a random task is another matter for debate, because they can't 'think' randomly per se, it all has to be coded, so any program is only as random as its creator designs it to be. However, for the purposes of a Q&A web site, PHP's rand() function is more than adequately random for anything they'd ever need - you'd have to be interested in something like life sciences or quantum physics to REALLY need something which can be shown to be absolutely random and never based on predetermined logic paths.


    Whoops, nerd mode off now :D

    Comments

    • Also keep in mind that it's only as random as the questions submitted to Answerbag. If 50% of them are about aardvarks, it will seem like those questions are favored when they are really only proportionally represented. ...Nerd mode can be turned off?!

      Darkling

      by Darkling on August 7th, 2006

    • There must not be that many qwuestions in the site. I know for sure I'ver seen questions three times in the last few weeks. Maybe it's an indicator I spend too much AB!

      oregon

      by oregon on August 8th, 2006

    • I looked into it a bit today, and I noticed all the questions in the scroll box are really recent. Maybe it scrolls through the last two weeks of questions.

      oregon

      by oregon on August 8th, 2006

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