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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.
I have heard YMCA an inordinate amount of times on my ipod shuffle. I wonder what that means.
...look for patterns, to at least internally provide an explanation. (whether it's true or accurate is irrelevant.) go to craps table - unless you are neurotic, everyone develops a pattern to how they roll the dice. no reasons, no explanations. we are just made to take emotional comfort in attributing some pattern, real or otherwise.
If i Hear Fiona APPLE one more time, I'll kill myself.
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.
Didn't stop him from submitting it to Slashdot though. No facts? Great, put it on the front page!
From the article:
I explained this phenomenon to Temple University prof John Allen Paulos, an expert in applying mathematical theory to everyday life. His conclusion: it's entirely possible that nothing at all is amiss with the shuffle function
The slashdot article??
Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites?
and
Apple denies it, of course
Enough with the inflammatory headlines!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
This post brought to you by Teenage Angst and Caffeine!
Elmo knows where you live!
I think slashdot favours certain articles and repeats them over and over again.
Clearly we need to lock an ipod in a room with the same scientists who discovered revolutionary psychic patterns in that little black box a couple of weeks back on slashdot.
Perhaps Ipod will predict when Hewy Lewis and the news will make a mainstream comeback?
You're absolutely right!@ There's an array inside the iPod shuffle of about 150 artists that will take precedence over all other artists and will play songs by those artists 3 times more than all others because because Apple recieved $100,000 per to make it happen.
Those of you that think that sounds completely plausable, please step to the left. Everyone else please step to the right.
Everyone standing on the left, please drink the magic juice we're distributing because you've been selected to come with us to the great beyond where you will experience another plane of being.
Everyone on the right, enjoy the rest of your life because you enjoy logic and reason.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
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.
:wq
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.
The summary suggest that Apple may be playing favorites, citing an article that concludes pretty definitely that they are not...
On macslash.org, there was an Ask MacSlash about iTunes somehow figuring out what songs sounded good together using some crazy sonic algorithm. The guy was asking if it was plausible that iTunes analyzed the songs in the playlist to spit out the best mix possible.
The basic consensus in the discussion was either "dude, your entire playlist is songs you like, of course it's gonna be a good mix.," or, the option mentioned above about humans looking for patterns.
Although, throughout my history of having large (over 1000 song) playlists, I've found that no matter what mp3 player I used (hardware, software, or otherwise), there always seemed to be certain bands or artists that would get play more often. I've had weeks at a time where I'd hear Snoop Dogg's Lodi Dodi, Iron Maiden's Quest for Fire or In Flames' Clayman nearly every time I picked up my iPod
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Seriously. There have got to be better submissions in the queue than, "I think my iPod shuffle is preferring certain songs over others. It's a conspiracy!" Come on.
"And Tonight at 6, can bees think?
A new study reveals that, no they cannot."
Reminds me of a Dilbert comic:
Accounting Troll: "Over here we have our random number generator"
Number Generator Troll: "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine"
Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?"
Accounting Troll: "That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure"
With a little bit of Logic and Reason, you could make your own music.
Then, you can offer apple $100,000.00 and see if they'll add you to their magic artist array!
Of course, you might have to pay out to the other artists on it, too, since you'd be decreasing their play frequency by 2/3 of a percent...
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
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If i Hear Fiona APPLE one more time, I'll kill myself.
Perhaps you could remove it from your iPod Shuffle loadout?
pants
Not at all - as was explained in TFA, these are the sorts of patterns you would expect to see with a normal RNG. People may actually be happier with a more complicated shuffle algorithm for shuffling which which ensured that, for example, songs on the same album did not occur too close together. AFAIK, a song will not repeat until all the songs in the device have been played through. However, when people re-shuffle the order this property is lost, so another desirable property might be to keep the last playing time of each song across shuffles and adjusting the order appropriately. If this is done, however, over time the order will be more and more constrained by what has gone before so after all that it is probably better, and definitely simpler, to just shuffle randomly without trying to do anything more complicated...
There are some quality random number generators on the Internet like Random.org, HotBits, and Lavarnd. But to be technical, their numbers come from background radio noise, radioactive decay, and lava lamps (er, "Lava Lite lamps"), meaning they don't truly generate it on the chip.
This sig is certified free of self-referential humour!
people need to understand that "even" distributions are not random. clusters exist when there is true randomness. learned this little snippet of knowledge from an episode of numb3rs when an algorithm was being devised to locate a serial rapist turned murderer based on his seemingly random series of attacks. so i guess people would prefer listening to a single song from a randomly selected artist from their collection, instead of a random song.
http://www.sledgehammercomputers.com
So, I know its us the loyal readership that is supposed to do the editing essentially (which makes me think we should have a moderation-style system for voting on which stories in the queue should go live (editors, you reading this?!!) but hey!) but when our favorite web tool has spell-checking built in, and you can search up to 32 words at a time.... I mean you might as well just cut and paste.
What's really interesting, that even though this is a geek site, we can't even get mathematician right. Even more silly is if you check the link above from google, you'll see that the first two results (of 3) are also from right here at the dot.
All I'm saying is: if it's power to the nerd masses, let's do it. Many posts so far are already complaining about the story. Not to mention it's from MSNBC. Not to mention I've already read it, because it's from almost four weeks ago.
I realize I am off-topic and complaining, but I wanted to see if we couldn't get a discussion going about a smarter, more democratic way to elect submissions to go live.
So before dismissing thousands of people, I'd entertain the idea that Apple's engineers simply stuffed up. It wouldn't be the first bug that slips through QA testing.
Sure, apple is spending R&D costs on creating a way to get their audio player to promote songs that users have already bought. Thats makes a ton of sense.
it's funny that would happen. i gave an example to my ap comp sci class last semester, a simple deck of cards. first, create a clean deck of cards, in order. then i simply loaded all the cards into an ArrayList (or a Vector, doesn't matter really), got a Random.nextInt(ArrayList.size()-1), grabbed that card, and threw it into the new deck, then ArrayList.trimToSize(). did that until the ordered deck was empty. i had them look for patterns. few emerge. then, we used a little recursion and shuffled x number of times. now, if a wannabe hacker like me, using java no less, can think to do that, then there should be no problem. hell, we're not talking about loading the actual mp3's, just the filenames. on an ipod shuffle, there's what, 500 songs? how many k are all the filenames gonna be really? load them into a (what the hell is the cocoa class?), shuffle into a new class, lather rinse, repeat. bingo. if there's repeating, and i don't know, my 20gb ipod plays iron maiden, slayer, etc., albums, i don't ever randomize. but that's me.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
This reminds me of the birthday paradox:
"The birthday paradox states that if there are 23 people in a room then there is a slightly more than 50:50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. For 60 or more people, the probability is greater than 99%. This is not a paradox in the sense of it leading to a logical contradiction; it is a paradox in the sense that it is a mathematical truth that contradicts common intuition. Most people estimate that the chance is much lower than 50:50."
Applied here, suppose you have 365 songs. How many random selections must be played before you have about a 50:50 chance of hearing a repeat? Just 23 songs.
What most people want is not random selection, but random order.
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
If the song that plays next is solely a function of the song that is playing now, the system will wander from song to song exploring the playlist until it finds a circular loop- unless care is taken from the outset to ensure that the entire playlist is one large loop. It would be mediocre programming, but I can see it happening. I seem to remember the shuffle in Windows Media Player doing this a lot with some MP3s I had- there would be a loop of ten songs that it seemed to "love". Once it hit the loop it never left it, and it always played the loop in the same order.
I noticed that too.
I have a 1GB iPod shuffle, currently it contains roughly 100 songs.
My iPod shuffle "prefers" playing BAD RELIGION and SLAYER.
I don't know how or why.
Maybe you guys can help me figure this out.
here's the breakdown:
100 tracks (roughly)
40 BAD RELIGION's song
40 SLAYER's song
20 of other bands
THIS IS REALLY FRUSTRATING that the iPod shuffle prefers playing SLAYER and BAD RELIGION.
HELP!!!!!!!
(***casm mode ends)
Maybe the editors have a *go with me on this*
:-D
Slashdot Shuffle (TM) system for the articles they post.
It would explain the dupes and the lack of quality control with one theory.
I keed, I keed
Think of it this way:
By supporting Apple, you're also supporting R & D for much of the entire personal computing industry.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
First, there is the possibility that Apple screwed up the shuffling algorithm -- although not entirely likely. If you ask an introductory programmer to write some code to shuffle an array, you'll most likely get something like this:
for i in range(array_length):
j = random() % array_length
temp = array[i]
array[i] = array[j]
array[j] = temp
This code does NOT produce all permutations with equal probability! Instead, you must use the following code:
for i in range(array_length):
j = i + (random() % (array_length - i))
temp = array[i]
array[i] = array[j]
array[j] = temp
}
This was cribbed from c2 -- see the full article text here for a more informative discussion.
Second, I see a lot of people saying "I have a 20GB iPod -- and I swear sometimes it just NEVER plays this one song." Okay, let's assume that a 20GB iPod holds 5000 mp3 files. What's the probability that you play 5000 songs in shuffle mode, and never hear a particular song?
It's the probability that 5000 times in a row, you hear some other song -- that is, one of the 4999 other songs. Calculating, we get:
(4999/5000)^5000 = 0.3678.
So we have a 36% probability of this happening -- which is not a negligible amount! This will further be compounded by two things: First, you have no way of recalling exactly it has been since you heard a particular song -- if your favorite song was played 1000 songs earlier, it probably feels like 2000. If it feels like 2000, it's probably 4000. Because it's a favorite song, your mind will exaggerate the amount. It's like if you crave nicotine, it can feel like days since you've had a cigarette when it's only been hours. Second, you probably have a lot of songs you would call a "favorite" -- with each having a 36% chance of not being played over the course of 5000 plays, your mind will probably register that at least one of them is "feeling neglected."
Probability is a strange and beautiful thing. Don't expect your average audiophile to understand it. (And I'm not claiming to understand it either, beyond a very cursory level.)
- shadowmatter
i agree. i have created 20-30 song playlists on my iPod and when i play that same playlist through multiple time, i find the songs ending playing in a similar order even though the songs should be playing randomly. For example, i did an experiment by playing a 21 song playlist through 6 times, and every single time one particular song was played first on the playlist... and i could closely predict the next 6 songs. Quite unrandom. I find it happening all the time.
This is not a problem of a bad shuffle algorithm. The problem here is thousands of years old. It is human nature. People see patterns where there are none. People generate theories based on these non-existent patterns. This is how people concluded that the sun orbits the Earth: "Oh, look, the sun looks like it is orbiting the Earth! Therefore it must be!"
The problem is, if you just put together a playlist with a bunch of artists and play it, it is entirely likely that someone will be played three times in the first hour. And in this guy's case, that someone was Steely Dan. So what does that prove?
About 500 years ago, we invented something called the "scientific method". Although it is taught to most people in both science and history classes, few seem to understand it.
The scientific method says that you cannot use past observations to make a conclusion. You must develop a specific test to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You must show before you perform the test that the outcome of the test is relevant to your hypothesis. You can then perform the test and use the results to back your conclusion.
The scientific method could very easily be applied here. What this guy needs to do is start with the prediction that Steely Dan or whoever will be played three times in the first hour. He must use statistics to compute the probability of this happenning in a purely random shuffle, and should show that the chances are less than 1% (this is a pretty straight-forward use of standard statistical methods). Then he should run the experiment and see what happens.
My guess? Steely Dan will not play three times in the first hour.
Without a proper scientific experiment proving this guy's theory, there is no story here.
> You're absolutely right!@ There's an array inside the iPod shuffle of about 150 artists that will take precedence over all other artists.
Back in late 2001, I wrote a simple program which learns which songs I press "Next(b)" before it completes. Finally after 8 weeks, I realized that I listen to- Eminem and other rap in the morning
- Pop music later into the afternoon
- Rock was for the 5-7 pm slots
- After 10 , it was usually playing Enigma and instrumentals
Was quite different on a weekend with no music on saturdays and often slow Elvis songs on sunday afternoonsQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Yvan eth nioj, baby!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
People don't want true randomness. If the machine picked each song to play randomly and independently, then it might play the same song twice in a row; and it might never play a song.
Instead, what people seem to want is to hear all of their music, in an unpredictable order. And that's a random shuffle. (Hence the name!) Each individual track selection depends on the previous ones.
That's also fairly easy to do too, of course. But most of the simple algorithms will assume that the set of songs is fixed... It's much harder to keep an even shuffle when adding or removing songs from the set. Maybe this is one cause of the 'problem'?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I've noticed that iTunes must generate a "random" sequence once per startup of iTunes. If after listening for a while you go back and explicitly listen to one of the songs you already heard and then let it continue randomly then it replays the same song order as before. They must seed the random generator once at startup instead of using the clock to seed each time they go to select the next song. So while the playlist is generated randomly, its the same randomness every time until a restart :)
Is Apple receiving kickbacks to promote certain artists? Apple denies it, of course.
Did marksilverman, a slashdot poster, kill a puppy to get an erection? marksilverman denies it, OF COURSE.
Reminds of the dilbert where he goes to the accounting department and he see the randum number generator troll.
....
Number generating troll: nine, nine, nine, nine, nine,
Dilbert: Are you sure its random numbers?
Acounting troll: That's the thing about random numbers. You can never be sure...
He, who dies with the most toys, wins
The iPod Shuffle does not randomly play songs. It shuffles the playlist...then plays the songs in the new order.
whereas a random play function could lead to a single track being played twice as often as another, shuffle precludes that.
hence the name, rather than "iPod Random".
--
Actually I am guessing you hit the nail on the head.
.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 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
I figure it has something to do with the random number generator in the baby-iPod.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
No, no, no, something like
"Apple backing away from unbiased iPod tune selection!"
The skewing effect requires that RAND_MAX is not a multiple of num_songs, and is very tiny when RAND_MAX is very much larger than num_songs.
But to see how the skewing arises, imagine you have num_songs = 3 songs with id's 0, 1 and 2, with random() returning 0 to RAND_MAX = 9. Then for random() returning 0, 3, 6 or 9, song_id is 0, so there's a 40% chance of hearing song 0, which presumably is "In The Navy".
of the time I was trying to explain probability to my second grade daughter. I took a coin out and flipped it five times in a row and it came up heads every time.
"Excuse, me," I said, "I'm going out to buy a lottery ticket."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I almost hate to mention it, but Windows Media Player has several "smart" playlists that can do just this. I think that one of them is "Songs I listen to at night" and another one is "Songs I like but haven't listened to lately".
Do I have to hand in my geek membership card for admitting that I use WMP?
-Montag
I was once brought in to fix an application that randomly picked people to pee in a bottle, and...
Hey, can I get a copy of that code?