hello all,

first off, everyone at kluster reads your feedback and us developers/statisticians/tech-heads are incorporating it as fast as possible.

second, thanks for being a part of these lab experiments and this community. we are very young (beta) and are refining our sites, our ideas and our decision engines.

/insert segue

i’ve pulled myself from the dredges of algorithm code and i’d like to share some insights with you all and hopefully clear up some of your concerns.

the algorithm strives to identify what you (the community) have decided is the best outcome. it is a decision support system, support being the operative word. we are constantly looking for holes and especially at this early stage, we expect to find them. once found, we assess, investigate, react and push out a newer version. the most important thing you should know is that the algorithm does not simply look for the idea with the most total investment. there are lots of variables, like WHO did each action, WHEN the action happened, and WHAT the action was.

WHEN is particularly important. If the selection process was as simple as overall popularity it would be very easy for users to “snipe” winning ideas, meaning that it would be easy to see which idea was going to be chosen and jump in with a big investment right at the end to ensure yourself a payout. We’re always concerned with ensuring your participation (investment) add value to the decision making process or the community as a whole, so we’ve attempted to correct for that behavior.

To assess the when and what, we run the data that are output through a series of filters. The filters are statistical tests that look at the distribution of investments in terms of amount, time and uniqueness, and then asses a likelihood that these (and other) variables are reflective of true community support. When these tests are done, the algorithm collates the data again and then runs a few final tests that rank ideas based on a number of variables that have inherent importance values.

One important thing to note (@josh) is that the timeline is relative to the ‘life’ of the idea and the stat tests judge based on that. therefore, it is entirely possible that an idea that is late in the game could win, provided it had support and valid investments based on time and amount and unique users count (not all the variables, but some to give you an idea).

We’re working with it guys, and always trying to improve the way it makes decisions. just today we realized (thanks in part to your feedback) that we had too much flexibility in the part of the algorithm that asses uniqueness. this has since been fixed. this comment thread and the feedback (and bringing to our attention any suspicious activity) is a perfect forum for improvement.

Thanks again and i’d be more than happy to field any questions.

hitch