Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites?

marksilverman writes "Steven Levy at Newsweek is reporting that his iPod Shuffle seems to favor certain songs. Is Apple receiving kickbacks to promote certain artists? Apple denies it, of course, and Levy had the good sense to ask a mathmatician and a cryptographer who explained that it's probably just humans finding patterns where there are none." Less neurotically, both CNet and PCWorld have discussions of the Shuffle's interior spaces.

Comments

Obligatory random != pseudo random

[MasterC]

Computers can't generate true random numbers (ok, at least I don't know of any current methods) but only pseudo random numbers. There's a precise mathematical description that gets you from one number to the next.

Who knows, maybe Apple uses the meta data for a song to determine the random order (anyone hack it yet and finding the algo?) and some people just get "lucky" like prof John Allen Paulos explained in the article. You might happen to flip 6 heads in a row (despite being a 1 in 64 chance of it happening) and you might get 6 songs from an artist in a row.

Sounds to me that it's a conspiracy theory at best.

Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random

[James_G]

Computers can't generate true random numbers (ok, at least I don't know of any current methods) but only pseudo random numbers

Intel has been including hardware RNGs in their chipsets for a while now. Apparently, this is a truly quantum random number generator, although that could be so much marketing material. A quick Google doesn't turn up any obvious pages disputing this, although I didn't look too hard. Wikipedia has more info.

Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random

[SpeedBump0619]

Computers can't generate true random numbers...

Right, but wrong.

A pure computational method for generating randomness has not been found...and I'd guess it can't be done.

However, there are a vast number of randomly timed things that happen in a computer. Your mouse movements have some level of randomness, the time between key strokes on your keyboard, etc.

There are ways to harness events which contain levels of randomness and use them to generate truly random numbers. I highly doubt that the ipod firmware really does this...since there are plenty of "random enough" algorithms for such a purpose.

I'll just bet you really wanted to know that too.

Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random

[agurkan]

No. There is no law of physics that determine when a radioactive decay occurs. Actually everything we know indicates a law cannot be formulated to determine that point in time, since it is not a well posed question. In other words, there is no way for us to determine this point in time, because it is not an observable (in the quantum mechanical sense).

anti-spoken word

[Noksagt]

If you have any audiobook or spoken word that have proper metadata, they will never be selected in shuffle mode. While this can be handy for not falling onto a 20 minute chapter of a book randomly, it also makes it a bit more difficult to create cut-ups, or experiment with random spoken words when you want to: you must retag the tracks.

This is also useful to take long tracks out of random selection. A friend retagged Pink Floyd's 23 minute long 'Echos' as a book after getting pissed off that his Shuffle always seemed to select it.

It's the nonpareil effect

[Jeremi]

I think what people are seeing is an example of the "nonpareil effect", named after the tasty little candies. The candies were typically colored either red or green, mixed together, and then stored in glass jars.

When looking at the candies through the side of the glass jar, the first thing you notice is that the distribution of red and green candies doesn't look evenly distributed at all. Instead, there are lots of areas where many red candies are adjacent, and lots of areas where many green candies are adjacent.

For a long time, many people thought there must be some kind of static electrical effect present that was causing candies of the same color to tend to stick together. Eventually, however, some statisticians did the math and found that there was no such effect at play -- in a completely random system, such "blobs" of like colors are inevitable. Indeed, a jar of candy with no such blobs would be a bit suspect -- what are the chances of the red and green candies always pairing up so that no groupings occur?

To put it another way: it's all in your heads, guys.

Re:Probably...

[mccalli]

I'm the author of StartupFrills, a now-ancient Mac utility to do various things at boot time. Amongst other things, it shows a random startup screen.

I noticed that screens towards the top end of the scale seemed to show up more than screens towards the bottom (ie. if you had twenty images, images one to ten would should up more than eleven to twenty). I did some sort of multipass algorithm to stop this happening - I forget exactly what I did now and the source is lost, but I definitely had to change things to make it acceptable.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:I beg to differ!

[Glonoinha]

Actually I am guessing you hit the nail on the head.

I was once brought in to fix an application that randomly picked people to pee in a bottle, and a few dozen people complained that they got picked a lot more than other people (out of about 300.) Well it seems that the 'programmer' that coded the app used two digit precision on all math calls (the coder was generally assigned to fiscal apps, two decimal places in money = two decimal places in his head.)

For those not reading between the lines, a random number returns a real number somewhere between 0 and 1, this real number is then multiplied by the maximum number in your expected range to come up with a random number between 0 and your top number (300 in this instance) but since he was using 2 digits of precision (ie, two digits after the decimal place) all the random function returned was .01, .02, .03, .04, ... .98, .99 and there are only a hundred of those, so there were only 100 possible choices spread across the 300 people on the list, and those 100 choices were coming up a LOT (no surprise there.)

I figure it has something to do with the random number generator in the baby-iPod.