Randomization Algorithm for 'Next' Playback Item Needs Major Improvement

[Nigel Hixson]

- Variety 0.4.13
- GNOME Shell 3.6.2
- Ubuntu 12.10

Greetings,

I typically run variety with only my Favourites folder showing.

I migrated Favourites to a new PC, and for the first couple days it was cycling through the range of wallpapers very well, showing me wallpapers in my favourites that I had never seen on my previous PC.

Now it seems some entropy in the random number generator is limiting selection again. When I hit 'next' it is common to see the same 3-4 wallpapers cycled through many many times before reaching a new one. There are some wallpapers that I never see. This is especially bad when manually moving through the Favourites library. I have the 'change on reboot' option enabled, and I often get a fresh new wallpaper.

I hope this bug report is descriptive enough. Great software you've made - keep up the great work.

Regards,
`Nigel

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

Bug report is descriptive, but I honestly can't imagine how this could happen. Variety's algorithm for choosing images is pretty simple - choose, say, 100 images randomly from all available (iterates the files in the folders in a random fashion until it has found enough and then it stops), show them one after another on next, once this prepared queue is consumed, choose again 100 images randomly, and so on. It does not try to use some complex logic as to which images you've seen, how many times, etc. - it does not even keep such stats. To put it another way, there is no "memory" as to what it has shown in the past, so it shouldn't matter how many days it has been running.

Only two other things affect this behavior - if you have specified size, color or rating filtering, only images that match are used (this is a case when you may see only 3-4 images even when you have many in the folders - if only those 3-4 match your filters); OR if Variety is set up to download automatically - the newly downloaded images are "pushed" to the front of the queue so that you see them soon.

Manual or automatic movement forward is irrelevant - they consume images from the same queue.

So, do you use filters and can the behavior you've witnessed be attributed to them? This may also explain why you don't see some images. Have in mind that Variety has some filters enabled by default (landscape resolution).
How many total images do you have in the folders? If you have tens and not thousands, what you describe is not improbable to have happened by pure chance.

[Nigel Hixson (nigel-hixson)]

Please close this bug. I think it was my imagination, or it has since been fixed.

[Peter Levi (peterlevi)]

You've probably just had a "lucky" run of several low-chance events happening one after another :-)