Pure nearest-cosine piled near-identical images into the neighbour grid — a
reposted banner filled all 24 slots, and once you wandered into a B&W /
comic-panel cluster every neighbour was more of the same with no way back to
colour without the Random button (operator-reported, with screenshot).
similar() now over-fetches a wide candidate pool (5x the requested limit, cap
200), then diversifies down to `limit`:
- pHash near-duplicate collapse: drop candidates within 6 Hamming bits of the
anchor or an already-kept candidate, so a repost (and the anchor's own clones)
appears at most once.
- MMR re-rank: greedily pick for closeness-to-anchor minus similarity-to-already
-picked (lambda 0.55), so the result SPANS clusters instead of returning 40
variations of one image. Falls back to nearest-order on any failure / small
pool, so existing nearest-first behaviour is unchanged when there's nothing to
diversify.
Frontend forwardTarget drops the now-redundant skip-nearest-third hack (the list
is already diversified server-side) — plain random-over-unvisited gives the
variance now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ttrj5P7upUTueSfoJcxEqa
bvandeusen
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