Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Chaos theory: what happens when Amazon buys you random stuff?

amazon box stock 1020

Darius Kazemi is buying random things — or, more accurately, his computer is. He's been feeding his Amazon bot $50 each month, letting it buy whatever it wants, and documenting the haul at randomshopper.tumblr.com. The first shipment contained a CD of avant-garde Hungarian music by Ákos Rózmann and Cartesian Linguistics by Noam Chomsky, one of the central theorists of machine cognition. When a book about sentient machines gets ordered by a bot, it’s hard not to think something is up. But Kazemi insists it's totally random. "It's like having a Martian as your personal shopper."


Genuinely random recommendations are remarkably hard to find on the web right now. Any given Amazon search is filtered by your history on the site, your...


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via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/4/3728500/amazon-random-shopper-recommendation-engines

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