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

[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.

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.