Schooling Microsoft On Random Browser Selection 436
Rob Weir got wind that a Slovakian tech site had been discussing the non-randomness of Microsoft's intended-to-be-random browser choice screen, which went into effect on European Windows 7 systems last week. He did some testing and found that indeed the order in which the five browser choices appear on the selection screen is far from random — though probably not intentionally slanted. He then proceeds to give Microsoft a lesson in random-shuffle algorithms. "This computational problem has been known since the earliest days of computing. There are 5 well-known approaches: 3 good solutions, 1 acceptable solution that is slower than necessary and 1 bad approach that doesn’t really work. Microsoft appears to have picked the bad approach. But I do not believe there is some nefarious intent to this bug. It is more in the nature of a 'naive algorithm,' like the bubble sort, that inexperienced programmers inevitably will fall upon when solving a given problem. I bet if we gave this same problem to 100 freshmen computer science majors, at least 1 of them would make the same mistake. But with education and experience, one learns about these things. And one of the things one learns early on is to reach for Knuth. ... The lesson here is that getting randomness on a computer cannot be left to chance. You cannot just throw Math.random() at a problem and stir the pot and expect good results."
Milliseconds (Score:3, Interesting)
They could as well just have used the last millisecond to show the browser. I mean, it's a screen shown only once to a user. What's more random, and uniform, than the time the screen appears in milliseconds modulo 5?
The top hit on Google... (Score:5, Interesting)
A Google search on:
gives exactly the bogus answer that Microsoft used in the top hit. [javascriptkit.com]
Unfortunately for Microsoft, a bing search gives the same top hit.
Re:do not fix! (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think it comes off worst at all. People usually look towards the right of the screen for the "go away and stop bugging me" button, and that's where Internet Explorer is 50% of the time.
Remember that the yellow exclamation mark in the system tray telling people they need to reboot is an annoyance when they just want to get on with their work. Then when the computer finally does reboot and they really really want to start doing whatever it was they turned on the computer to do, they get this annoying thing about web browsers.
Re:He's just bitching (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know what you consider "99.99% random", but the difference between 20% (probability of IE turning up last in a real random shuffle) and ca. 50% (probability of IE showing up last in the implemented "random shuffle") is certainly significant enough that you can't call it 99.99% random." You might argue that it is "random enough for this," but that's of course a matter of opinion, and therefore debatable (there's no objective definition of "random enough").
Malice? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bad Article, Bad Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Both the article and the summary mixes up the concepts. Randomness and bias are related but different things. Think of a biased coin loaded in favor of heads - the heads may appear twice as often as the tails, but the distribution is still random. Here too, contrary to the summary's claim of "far from random", the results are random, just biased, and biased against IE, if I may add, which is an important fact the summary omitted.
Re:He's just bitching (Score:5, Interesting)