There was a delightful Usenet post way back around 1990, where someone described how they had just purchased a new multi-CD player. They very excitedly filled it up with their collection of Prince CDs, and set it to random shuffle play mode.<p>Great for a while, but then they complained that all the slow songs were bunched together. And perhaps the random shuffle play mode was sampling the songs, deriving the tempo of each, and adjusting the shuffle accordingly.<p>Very funny.<p>---<p>Heh-heh, I independently came up with Fibonacci hashing for color many years ago.<p>My web app was drawing a diagram of N rectangular items, color-coded to tell them apart, with a table listing the details of each below.<p>(Normally I would use EIA standard colors, with a nod to my EE brethren.)<p>But I didn't want the colors to bias anything. So you'd normally try random colors. But random colors can come out weird and some can be close together.<p>So I used a Golden Angle around the hue circle, with a constant brightness and saturation. And sure enough, the generated colors were nicely differentiated.<p>BUT... not as nice as I'd like. Something was wrong.<p>It turns out that our perception of color is more complex. And when we're differentiating between colors, it really, really helps if the colors are familiar, and describable.<p>So simple colors like blue and purple are much easier to differentiate than a new weird blueish color and a new weird purplish color.<p>So my Golden Angle colors were technically superior, but not as good a user experience.