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The Perception of 'Random' on the iPod

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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.

3 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Bias by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

    1. Re:Bias by pchan- · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is exactly what is going on. Good call, AC.

      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.

  2. Re:OCD by monoqlith · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not OCD. Sub-clinical schizophrenia. . Read all the way to the end of the article(I'm new here). If you don't want to, I'll summarize: It's more about randomness than the iPod. He eventually realizes his suspicions of programmer malfeasance are in fact an expression of his own favoritism, not the iPod's. In other words, its all in his head. So a worthwhile, interesting article, and even if he could have benefitted by experimenting himself, that wouldn't have made for a very fun read, or an interesting question to ask Steve Jobs while he had the chance.