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The Perception of 'Random' on the iPod
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Oct 08, 2006 09:37 PM
from the learning-machines dept.
from the learning-machines dept.
Robaato writes "Stephen Levy writes in the Guardian about the perception of randomness, or the lack thereof, on an iPod set to shuffle." From the article: "My first iPod loved Steely Dan. So do I. But not as much as my iPod did.... I didn't keep track of every song that played every time I shuffled my tunes, but after a while I would keep a sharp ear out for what I came to call the LTBSD (Length of Time Before Steely Dan) Factor. The LTBSD Factor was always perplexingly short." My first iPod shuffle refused to let me delete (sigh) Weird Al's Polkamon off of the flash memory.
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And Zonk dupes himself... again... (Score:5, Funny)
How about an analysis of the randomness of Zonk dupes. I guess I should be happy it's not a games story.
Re:And Zonk dupes himself... again... (Score:5, Informative)
That article is btw referenced in this one.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, the other story was feb of 05. Dupes suck, but do you really expect Zonk to remember every single story he's posted?
Besides, the article that was linked to was recent.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dupe Tag (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
So? Do you remember every comment you've posted?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It might as well be; he's certainly not doing any editing!
Re: (Score:2)
Bias (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bias - hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
The article mentions the "how many people does it take to get to a shared birthday thing" - and the point there is that its not that it takes 40 people to get to one with a SPECIFIC birthday but only 40 o
Re:Bias (Score:5, Informative)
Some years ago, I worked on an mp3 playing device (no, not Apple). Our users were quite often complaining that our random was not truly random, and seems to be clustering, favoring, disliking some thing or another. Some would swear that there was some intelligence to it, picking particular songs. I've seen the shuffle code, it's a simple array swap. I ran a numerical simulation on the output and found that the distribution of the array elements from their original position equal throughout. Further, there seemed to be no specific clustering, as the probability that any item would end up next to any of its peers was again equally distributed throughout. We had some of the customers submit their own ideas and tried them out in code. In general, we found that we never outperformed the simple array swap in terms of randomness, though most results were about the same.
The conclusion that we reached: If you have a lot of Jimmy Buffet, you're going to hear a lot of Jimmy Buffet. And on that one occassion that two Buffet songs play back to back, you're going to think to yourself "this random sucks". But it is, in fact, all in your head.
*I'm sure someone will want to bring up the seed issue. Let's just say that we had it covered.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple does include an option for the minimum number of songs before playing an artist again, but that doesn't necessarily fix
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
iTunes 7 does.
Mind, it doesn't do anything particularly useful with it, but you have Last Skipped and Skip Count available for Smart Playlists, so you could probably get some way towards what you want...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't even necessarily want 1 of those 10 songs played every 100. Last year I made a multi-thousand-song playlist in iTunes. After shuffling it and listening mostly through, I was noticing when tracks by Wolfstone played. I went back and realized that about 80% of those tracks had played in the first half of the playlist. Because the last
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In my last job, I listened to MP3s all day while working. I'd got RoboDJ feeding in the playlist, and Audioscrobbler logging the results.
Which turned out - that, remarkably consistently, Iron Maiden, Placebo and System Of A Down (typically 'Aerials' from Toxicity) got played more than their weightings justified, while Deep Purple measurably less than theirs. Including compensating for number of tracks held.
It
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This is exactly the thing I try to point out to people who play the lottery and insist that their numbers are far more likely to come up than the 1 2 3 4 5 I suggest they play.
OCD (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, instead of wasting your interviewee's time, you could have installed a five song list on your iPod and set it to shuffle. You'd have to carefully mark down the track number being played and listen to it for 100 songs. Do this a few times and make sure you're very methodical about what you do. Wipe the iPod, put five songs on it in order and then listen to a hundred songs "randomly." If you start to see a pattern developing or one song is obviously favored over the other, it will begin to show up.
But on the more technical side, they have to seed the random variable with something. Whether or not it's an internal clock, I'm not sure. Either way, they have to derive a random number and it's possible that their seed isn't good enough or has too few states or is prone to being seeded at the same state, etc. Based on this information, I hate to break it to you but it is very hard to be truly random.
Re: (Score:2)
Just to be pedantic, they have to derive psuedo-random numbers. And although it is hard, there are doz
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The simple truth is that the shuffle was an extremely lame product that was only created so Apple could cover the entire price range of mp3 players. Nobody else had the gall to sell a player with no display. "An experience in aural spontaneity..." pardon me while I barf. It was a simple matter of designing to a price. I won't question Apple on it because they've made more money from the iPod than I ever would have imagined. The folks who bought a Shu
Re:OCD (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Whoa... (Score:2)
There must be bias on the internet. I remember reading the same thing not ten minutes ago in TFA... cre
Sorry buddy, i disagree (Score:2, Interesting)
SLAYER!!!!!!!1 (Score:4, Funny)
Mine loves Chevelle (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Old News. (Score:5, Informative)
I personally have had it happen where my iPod is in shuffle mode and I've heard not just two songs in a row by the same artist, but a song plays and then the next song from that album follows it. And that's with a library of over 5,000 songs. Naturally it's more likely to happen on a much smaller Shuffle with a fraction of the songs.
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Truly Random (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I just ran a simulation here of 100 songs, randomly chosen until all 100 songs had been selected once, and ran it 1000 times. On average, it took 523 choices to exhaust the list due to re
People are Pattern seekers (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it, if you're at the roulette table and black has come up four times in a row, how likely are you to bet black? Most people would bet red, because, I mean hey, there's got to be a pattern. But (as I'm sure you all can understand) black has the same probability of occurring again as red does.
People have had this complaint about all sorts of playlist randomizers (not just iPod), it's just people seeing what isn't there.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Two random modes (Score:3, Insightful)
SmartShuffle (Score:4, Interesting)
With SmartShuffle, the order is randomized, but it remains the same until you "reshuffle".
It's because of the birthday paradox (Score:4, Informative)
The basic gist is that their are far more possible pairs than we'd intuitively imagine. For example, with 20 albums of 20 songs each, the chance of two songs in a row being from the same album is actually:
400/400 * 20/400 = 1/20
Which makes a lot of sense once you sit down and think about it, but is a lot higher than an uneducated guess.
This is the same reason that collision/timing attacks are feasible.
Re: (Score:2)
The downside of all this is we get gypped out of 3 birthday cakes this way since we only have one for all four of us.
Re:It's because of the birthday paradox (Score:4, Funny)
I think it's more than that. Yes, coincidences will happen, but I also think part of the issue with people perceiving patterns is that they can switch patterns whenever a new pattern seems to emerge. So, with reference to the Birthday Paradox, it's true that, in a party, it's more likely than you think that two people will have the same birthday, but what if you aren't bound by birthdays? What if you're just constantly looking for anything two people could have in common? If you're at the party constantly talking about dates, birthdays, anniversaries, favorite colors, food alergies, etc.-- then there's an excellent chance that you'll find there are lots of people in the party that something in common.
In the case of the iPod, i have an iPod and put it on shuffle often enough. For a little while, i'd always be suspicious that there was something going on. It seemed to happen way too often that I'd get two songs together off the same album or the same band, or I'd get a bunch of '80s songs together, or a lot of songs that I'd grouped in the same genre. You know, no specific pattern I could use to predict what would come next, but on any given day, I seemed to be able to find a pattern.
It wasn't always very conscious or thought out, but I'd catch myself thinking, "weird, I've heard 4 songs from the same album in the last hour. The iPod must not be mixing it up enough." But then I noticed some of my patterns were like, "huh, I've heard a couple Nirvana songs and Foo Fighter songs. My iPod must like Dave Grohl today." And then I realized, I didn't have the name "Dave Grohl" in any metadata anywhere. In order for the pattern to be caused by the library, you'd have to assume that the iPod's circutry somehow knew that Grohl was in both of those bands, but without any such link existing in my iTunes library.
So of course I got rid of the iPod, because it was obviously possessed by the devil and obessesed with Dave Grohl. I guess this guy [slashdot.org] is right.
Parent
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
FTFA:Or
What you should expect... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't recall when the shuffled playlist was reshuffled but in was not that often, maybe only when you added or removed tracks. So if you like Smoke on Water but that Ballroom Blitz is just two song after that, too bad, you'll always get Ballroom Blitz soon after you double click on Smoke on Water. Technically speaking, the shuffling was perfect, the random generator was properly seeded and they divided in the right way to prevent loosing entropy. The lack of reshuffling was entirely responsible to the perceived lack of randomness.
So my patch was just that: trigger reshuffling a lot more often. As far as I know this patch was never merged but my copy of XMMS did have the proper random behavior. I don't know if it's the same problem with the iPod. That's something I like with free software: you can fix it!
Netgear MP101 randomness (Score:2)
If I select any playlist, and hit "PLAY" when the shuffle option is set to "Random" - then it plays the same order of songs every single time. To get a genuinely "more random" feel to the way it plays songs, I have to select the non-first song at the start of the playlist, then hit PLAY - and then hit "NEXT". After *that* it seems to be relatively random (Except for a pre-disposit
Check the play count (Score:3, Informative)
(I looked at mine; it was closer to uniform than I'd perceived. There's also a "Skip Count", but it's blank for all my songs.)
Well, my iPod has GPS (Score:2)
Or maybe it's not a grand conspiracy at all, but this grand idea called chance.
Human brains hardwired for temporal connections. (Score:2)
In other words, it might be better to be a little over paranoid and think that the random shuffle on an Ipod isn't random, that childhood vaccinations cause (insert disease here) than it is to miss the fact that when
How about iPod Tetris' randomness? (Score:2)
Seems to me like the programmers used a bad choice of a seed value for the random number generator.
Similar to radio stations (Score:5, Informative)
There's a simple parameter that's set to control, to within one minute, the amount of temporal separation there must be between playing two songs from the same artist, or the same song twice. The radio algorithm is a little more complicated, since songs aren't in just one big batch like the iTunes library, but in different categories, based generally on the perceived desire of target listeners to hear a given new song, or like and identify with a given older song.
The system is built off the (once literal, now metaphorical) use of index cards: The format clocks say, e.g., at the top of the hour, play a P category song, followed by a B category song, then a G, then an A, etc. You'd have a set of rules, like "don't play the same artist within 45 minutes" or "don't play the same current song within 3 hours", and you'd take the first card in the category that fit all the rules, play it, and move the card to the back of the stack.
Basically, what Apple is doing with that slider is enabling artist separation control, which is completely one of the illusions radio stations (used to) use to convince you they had every song under the sun available to them.
Soul of iPods (Score:3, Funny)
Humans and dictionaries define random differently (Score:5, Insightful)
I could go on and on, but what it really amounts to is that when most people say "random" they mean "carefully arranged in a thoroughly mixed-up order". This is almost the *opposite* of what a mathematician or computer programmer thinks the word "random" means.
For this reason, when describing a mathematically-random sequence to an end user, I never EVER use the word "random". I generally call it something like "arbitrary" or "unpredictable". This greatly reduces complaints.
Now, as far as song frequency, I like to rate my tracks on a scale of 1-10, and rig my playlist so that anything under a 6 never plays unless I specifically select it, tracks rated 7 play twice as often as those rated 6, and the frequency keeps going up the higher my rating is. (I only have eight tracks rated as a 10, and they're all things I don't mind hearing back-to-back.) Then if I find a track is playing more often than I like, I figure I rated it too high and cut back its rating.
Like Scientoloigists extinguishing streetlights! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a shame how people on Slashdot aren't allowed to just like iPods -- they always feel pressured to justify the purchase.
"Best tool for the job" isn't good enough. You have to be different. But only in a pro-Linux anti-iPod sort of way. Any o
Truly, a Slashdot legend (Score:5, Funny)
Parent