When a writer was ready to release a post, he or she was encouraged to come up with as many as eight different potential headlines and several options for the accompanying photo. Nguyen’s software would then publish each permutation of these inputs, so that for a few minutes a dozen or more versions of the post would bounce around the internet, each appearing to different readers. Once her machine collected a sufficient data sample on the relative popularity of each rendition, the computer would select the best-performing one and eliminate the others.
