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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.
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
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
The summary suggest that Apple may be playing favorites, citing an article that concludes pretty definitely that they are not...
We actually talked about this in my statistics class today. The professor actually had a friend who could flip a coin and get it to land on whatever he wanted, virtually every time. Made alot of money hustling people with that. It is possible to develop patterns of manipulating 'random' events, through skill of hand (or programming skill), that to most people still look like they're obeying pure randomness, but are actually being subtly manipulated behind the scenes. There's no doubt in my mind it's a possibility that Apple is trying to walk that line.
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.
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"
Or it could be an accident. For example, picture this code:
const int song_id=random()%num_songs;
At a first glance, that might look reasonable; however, once you start to get a lot of songs (and you start to approach RAND_MAX), it will skew your result in favor of low-ID songs.
Who knows if anything is going on here, though.
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
This page has more information about this phenomenon, called the clustering illusion. Another manifestation is streak scoring in sports, a.k.a. the hot hand in basketball. Players are often though to be "on a roll" when in fact their larger scoring pattern fits a random distribution around a mean.
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
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
This absolutely right. Also, using this method, inevitably some songs will occur multiple times in the playlist, since you're not keeping track of dupes (much like slashdot).
If you need to randomize an array, the easiest way to do it is to assign each item a random number, and then sort the array using the random numbers as a key. That way every item occurs only once in the randomized list.
You still need a decent pseudo random number generator of course, if you're using a pseudo random number generator that only produces 5 discrete values and repeats them over and over it doesn't help much.
On the other hand, for an application like a playlist shuffle, you don't need a cryptographically secure RNG, just a PRNG (such as a Mersenne Twister), that uses the current time in milliseconds as a seed would do nicely.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
> 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
This is got to be a result of the random number generator. Winamp and XMMS are exactly the same in this regard. When my music collection got big enough, I usually just put the player into shuffle mode. It always seems to pick the same songs over and over. Of course, the results are slightly different in XMMS as compared to Winamp.
Of course, I just opened Winamp to test this out and it knows I'm blabbing about it and it's playing music I have not heard in a while.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.