Compton’s 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem describes a big difficulty for artists dealing with generators. That is, it is all too easy to generate artifacts that, though distinct from one another, don’t vary in any significant ways from one another. In other words, the audience doesn’t care that each one is different if the audience cannot tell that they are unique in any interesting ways.
This doesn’t exactly matter when artists are dealing with things that don’t have to necessarily seem all too different from one another. If things are presented physically apart from one another, their similarity isn’t immediately clear or even important to a viewer.
When things are presented as a collection of artifacts, close to one another either physically or temporally, this becomes more of an issue.
Dealing with order might be an interesting way to overcome some minor instances where this occurs—figuring out which artifacts are interesting near other artifacts and modifying the generator to emphasize that. With each generation, some quality could be gradually changed. The result would be a gradation of objects that, when viewed as a whole, are interesting.