Hey @richbhanover,
As the name of the feature itself suggests, “<b>Randomize</> Uploaded Headers”, meaning that it is not bound to display all the images uploaded by you in a sequence.
The images will get displayed randomly.
However, if you have doubts regarding the steps, you can check out the below article link:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-random-header-images-to-your-wordpress-blog/
Thanks for the speedy response. I am seeing different images, but the pattern is definitely not random. Two observations:
1) The same image will show up a couple times in a row, or a small set of images will cycle through several times, before switching to other images;
2) The distribution is definitely not random. I refreshed 100 times, with this distribution. Note that certain images appear 5 to 8 times while other were only displayed once.
8 bent branch
7 house with christmas lights
6 trail to franklin hill
6 tennis court fence
6 second mirrored sunset
6 mirrored sunset
6 Holts ledge (little field in center)
5 sunset with big pine in center
5 sunset on snowy field
5 moon mirrored on lake
5 lone red tree
4 ice flowers
4 holts ledge horizon
4 christmas trees on common
5 sun shining on frozen pond
3 orange sky
3 hoarfrost
2 lake beach summer
2 house from hill
2 foggy top to post hill
2 compass hill view
1 pond from pinnacle
1 forest glade
1 foliage on papoose trail
As a long-time computer professional, this feels like a bug. How would I report this? Thanks.
Joy
(@joyously)
You can’t prove that it’s not random. And how would you write a test to prove that it is random?
As a computer professional, you know that you can only get psuedo-random.
If you really want to open a ticket, go to https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ but since there’s no way to reproduce your results or to test randomness, I doubt that a ticket will do anything.
Thanks for the link to the trac system. I’ll throw a note over there.
(I don’t really want to get into a semantic debate, I know about pseudo-random number generators. But the behavior of my two short-term tests, with three dozen and 100 samples, are not random.
The expected “random result” would be that each image appears roughly the same number of times. In my large test, half the images get shown 5-8 times, while other images only appear once.)
Thanks again.
Randomness works this way. It’s incorrect to expect that such a large number of images would distribute evenly with such a small sample size. The results you show here look pretty normal.
Thank you all for your extremely kind responses. I have done some modeling of my own, running a Python program several times, to look at the distribution of random.choices() from a set of 24 items. You’re correct: the distribution I presented doesn’t seem to be out of line for actual random selection.
I guess my concern is one of user experience: Images don’t appear random to the viewer. As I noted:
* The same images frequently appear two times in a row.
* A few images frequently appear several times “in a cluster” that doesn’t seem to be randomly.
Some of you know that I have opened a ticket on Trac https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/51739#ticket.
Consequently, I’m closing this as my thoughts are adequately represented there. Thank you again.
