Ranking algorithm based on user voting (d) Newton's Law of cooling

The first three articles in this series introduce the ranking algorithms for hacker News,reddit and Stack overflow.

Today, a more general mathematical model is discussed.

Each article in this series can be read separately. However, to ensure that everyone is on the same page, let me say that, so far, we have tried to solve the same problem in different ways: according to the user's vote, the "Jevin ranking" has been decided in the recent period.

You might think that this is a whole new subject that comes with the internet and needs a whole new way to solve it. But, actually not. We can think of "Jevin rank" as a "natural cooling" process:

(1) Any time, the site of all the articles, have a "current temperature", the highest temperature article in the first place.

(2) If a user voted in favour of an article, the temperature of the article rose once.

(3) As time goes by, the temperature of all articles is gradually "cooled".

The implication of this hypothesis is that we can copy the cooling laws of physics and use ready-made formulas to establish a functional relationship between "temperature" and "time" to easily construct an "exponential attenuation" (exponential decay) process.

The great physicist Newton, as early as 17th century, proposed the mathematical formula for temperature cooling, which was later called "Newton's Law of cooling" (Newton ' laws of cooling). We use this law to build the ranking algorithm.