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Reminds of the shuffle function on iPods which had to be made less random in order to appear more natural to users.
by psv1 7y ago
Reminds of the shuffle function on iPods which had to be made less random in order to appear more natural to users.
- loudmax 7y agoMy father built a picture frame display out of a Raspberry Pi and and old LCD monitor. It shows collections of photos in random order (that is, photos are grouped into directories and it pics a directory at random and displays those in sequence, then pics the next directory at random). He says he often gets the sense that some photo sets seem to show up more frequently than others. Helped him program the Pi, and I'm confident it really is random. Our brains are optimized to detect patterns, we'll pick out patterns where there aren't any. It doesn't feel random but it is. Also, true randomness isn't optimal for the picture frame display or the iPod. True randomness does annoying things sometimes like pick the same thing twice in a row even though there are hundreds to choose from. Apple had the right idea here.