I'm trying to figure out a win/lose algorithm where we have to have (around) X winners per day spread across the day without knowing the number of participations.
A user sends a request to an application that immediately decides at random whether the user has won or not. We don't know the number of requests when we start. Is there a way to make this work more or less? We want to spread the winners over the number of requests, not over time, because the requests are not divided equally over the day.
I was thinking about starting with an estimated number of requests per day, dividing the winning participations across that number, and altering the estimated number with the average of the actual requests. Any other suggestions?