Randomize all slider options?

[wahidshafique]

Hey, super cool! I was thinking, as a feature request, the option to randomize within sets, it might lend to more easily discovering cool patterns.

[doersino]

I actually implemented this early on in UJI's development – the code's still there, albeit commented-out:

uji/script.js

Lines 309 to 327 in 59f8519

	// commented-out since it only very rarely produces interesting results – the
	// space is just way too n-dimensional. also, would need to deal with floating
	// point stringification stuff, which ugh
	/*function randomize() {
	let randomized = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(defaults));
	Object.keys(options).forEach(n => {
	const o = options[n];
	const v = optionValues[n];
	const minScaled = o.min / o.step;
	const maxScaled = o.max / o.step;
	let rand = parseInt(minScaled + Math.random() * (maxScaled - minScaled)) * o.step;
	if (!o.step.toString().includes(".")) {
	rand = parseInt(rand);
	}
	randomized[n] = rand;
	});
	applyOptions(randomized);
	}*/

It worked fairly well when there were only a few options, but as I added more, it started delivering bad results exceedingly frequently. (Because: If randomizing any one option has a, say, 50% probability of yielding a cool image, with 20 options, the total probability is more or less 0.5²⁰, which is a really tiny number.)

So a button to randomize all sliders won't yield many interesting results, but randomizing within sets as you suggest (or randomly jiggling a few sliders) might be worth a shot. How to communicate that through the UI is another challenge. I think it makes sense to postpone this, though, until I implement an undo/redo feature as mentioned in README.md.