Five diversity mechanics — applied to both For-You and Songs-Like-X.
1. For-You seed rotates daily across the user's top-5 most-played
tracks. pickForYouSeedForDay uses userIDHash(user, day) mod
len(seeds) so today's mix uses an entirely different similarity
pool than tomorrow's. Within-day determinism preserved.
2. JitterMagnitude bumped 0.0 → 0.1. The scoring RNG is now seeded
by userIDHash(user, day) rather than the no-op, so near-tied
candidates shuffle daily without breaking within-day stability.
3. Head/tail split moves from 20+5 to 12+13. Roughly half the
playlist comes from the tail now (daily-deterministic via
tieBreakHash), giving the user substantially different content
while a 12-track anchor of strong similarity matches keeps the
mix recognizable.
4. Songs-Like-X seed artists shuffle daily across the user's top-5
played artists. pickSeedArtistsForDay applies a userIDHash-seeded
Fisher-Yates and takes 3.
5. scoreAndSortCandidates / pickTopN / pickHeadAndTail gain a userID
parameter so the RNG can be seeded per-user; existing call sites
updated; noopRNG removed.
Test fixtures widened similarity gaps (e.g. float64(50-i) instead of
(50-i)/50) so the new jitter (±0.1) doesn't perturb head ordering in
assertions about the head/tail mechanism. New seed_selection_test
coverage for userIDHash + pickForYouSeedForDay + pickSeedArtistsForDay
spans deterministic-within-day, varies-across-days, and graceful
degradation with small candidate pools.
PickTopPlayedTrackForUser replaced by PickTopPlayedTracksForUser
:many in the prior commit (b4801c2). The For-You seed lookup now
goes through pickForYouSeedForDay over the returned slice.
PickSeedArtists's LIMIT widened to 5 in the same prior commit.
For #392 Half A — system playlist content diversity. Half B
(per-user timezone scheduling) is a separate spec.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two improvements to the system playlist builder:
1. Per-artist (<=3) and per-album (<=2) caps applied to the
pickTopN truncation step, using the same numeric caps Discover
already enforces. Both For-You and Songs-like-X benefit. Same
skewed candidate pool no longer collapses to "10 tracks from
the same artist" — the playlist always carries at least 9
distinct artists in 25 slots.
2. New pickHeadAndTail function for For-You: 20 top-similarity
tracks + 5 sampled from the tail (positions 2*headN onward of
the score-sorted, cap-applied pool). Tail sampling uses
tieBreakHash for daily determinism — same user same day still
sees the same playlist, but the daily refresh feels less
stuck-in-a-rut. Tail tracks are still similarity-related
(they passed the similarity candidate filter) so the user
should enjoy them, just from artists they wouldn't have surfaced
via strict top-N ranking.
Songs-like-X keeps the simple pickTopN call — the seed-artist
context already provides the "you'll like this" framing without
needing a tail injection.
Refactors pickTopN internals: now sorts candidates first via
scoreAndSortCandidates, applies the cap on []Candidate via
capCandidatesByAlbumAndArtist, and truncates. Removes the now-
dead stableSortByScoreThenHash helper (only used in old pickTopN).
The cap helper mirrors capByAlbumAndArtist in discover.go but
operates on recommendation.Candidate so it sees Track.AlbumID /
Track.ArtistID directly.
Tests cover the cap helper truth table, head+tail split with
small/large pools, buffer-zone exclusion, daily determinism, and
cross-day tail variance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bvandeusen