Think of every single erroneous belief that people have about randomness. A pleasing music-randomizer algorithm obeys all of these. The term found on a lot of

Think of every single erroneous belief that people have about randomness. A pleasing music-randomizer algorithm obeys all of these. The term found on a lot of music players is not "random", it is "shuffle", and this is an important distinction. The term comes from cards. Take a deck of cards, shuffle it, and turn each card over in order from top to bottom. You expect that every card in the deck will be seen once and only once; turning up, say, two eights of clubs in a row means that something is dreadfully wrong with your deck. Humans tend to expect a similar behavior from "shuffle" modes: the same song does not repeat for a while. If people are shuffling by song, then they may also expect that performers don't repeat within a (smaller) timeframe. Nobody expects "pick a random number between 1 and numsongs, play that song, repeat, and be perfectly happy to play Baby Shark forty-seven times in a row if that number keeps on coming up".