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Spice Your Website with Randomness
The Appeal of Randomness
Constructing web and mobile applications with an element of randomness is known to attract users. People like to be surprised.
Such randomness is used in the hot BeReal mobile app, where users are asked at a random time during the day to take a picture and share it with their friends.
Chatroulette was a hugely popular web application where you are matched randomly with strangers for a video conference. Though today it is largely out of mode.
Apple Music lets you shuffle a playlist that, combined with a repeat option, creates a pleasant background music effect.
In the Amazon bookstore, you can electronically read parts of a book before buying it, with a *Surprise Me option to read some random section.
Randomness in Computer Games
Computer games have been using randomness for years in two primary forms.
- Input randomness in which a player is brought into a seemingly random landscape with other game actors appearing at random.
- Output randomness in which the player’s actions have a non-deterministic random effect in the game world.
