Yes, I think so. It might be of interest to you that there is now some published work on bandit algorithms for when all you have is ranking, not absolute order

Yes, I think so. It might be of interest to you that there is now some published work on bandit algorithms for when all you have is ranking, not absolute ordering. This is close to what we were talking about: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.3393.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.3393.pdf