Posted by Al on July 28, 2003 at 09:42:33:
Having spent far too much time playing with this today, some further thoughts....
There is a certain compulsiveness to the selection process. I think this is due to the fact that you never know what is going to pop up on the next choice and you always hope for something a little better. I guess it taps into the same psychology as the 'Virtual Skinner Box' (link below if you're interested). After a while though I started to grow bored. There is simply too much repetition and not enough reward.
A possible solution:
What if you were randomly and very infrequently allowed to play God with the information? Perhaps the ability to select snip points in or to add a word to or subtract a word from one of the Top 10 to create a new poem to be added to the pool. This might encourage the more compulsive of us to keep driving evolution even in the face of a homogenous and slowly evolving pool and might also have the benefit of introducing variation to prevent the pool from stagnating. There is obvious potential for abuse if too much free reign is allowed but even that might be sustainable if the changes were only allowed on a very very infrequent basis.