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My idea of what random actually looks like has been affected a lot by generating random numbers with a computer. They just don’t actually look that random. I r

My idea of what random actually looks like has been affected a lot by generating random numbers with a computer. They just don’t actually look that random. I read an anecdote about the iPod shuffle (hey kids - it was a music player with no screen so you could not choose songs directly) - they initially set it to be genuinely random in the way it chose the next song - people didn’t like it. It didn’t _feel_ random to pick a song you only just listened to again. So they had to make an algorithm that was sort-of-random but with some constraints to make it feel how we expect randomness to be.

tomsmeding 5y ago
I mean, that makes sense. What I want when putting a music player to "shuffle" is not "give me something unpredictable" -- that's fundamentally what randomness means. What I want is "give me something new". Something new is not something random, it's something _different_ from before, if reasonably possible.
- sjmm1989 5y ago
  Which to a machine may as well be the same thing in either phrasing. You want something different from what you just listened to. To it, anything not 'that song' is different and 'new' potentially if also not 'just listened to' within a certain set amount of songs. Even without that certain set of songs being logged and considered; any picking of a different song from the last is verifiably random. Think of it all like a deck of cards. Shuffle is apt in that sense. You don't expect to see double aces each time you pick through the shuffled deck of cards, but sometimes you do. Sometimes, you also find double jacks, queens and kings; in a row. Sometimes you don't. That deck could be shuffled by the worlds best trick shufflers. Still gonna get doubles now and then. True Randomness is not really technically possible. At least, not with our current technologies available; and we have a lot of aces up our sleeves. The best we can manage for randomness right now, is creating random strings of numbers to serve as the seed for new randomness. At least, if I understand correctly. If I do, then this is why cryptography is so damn important for us in the computational side of things. Network Security requires randomness.
  - tomsmeding 5y ago
    If I understand you correctly, I think you missed my point. You're explaining how with true randomness, you get different stuff most of the time and the same stuff some of the time. That is true. But it's not what people want when they press shuffle. What people want is something _different_, and giving the same song twice is not something different. As another commenter wrote, giving multiple (different) songs after each other from the same album would even be undesirable, even if that could occur perfectly well with random shuffling. A human pressing "shuffle" usually doesn't want randomness. They want pleasing _variation_. See e.g. the "Comparison" heading here: https://blog.demofox.org/2017/10/20/generating-blue-noise-sample-points-with-mitchells-best-candidate-algorithm/ https://blog.demofox.org/2017/10/20/generating-blue-noise-sa...
    - Out_of_Characte 5y ago
      This is true for many games as well, their "1%" chance usually means you'll always get lucky twice in a series of 200 attempts
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    You would expect a shuffled deck of 52 unique cards. Not a deck of three 5 of spades. Likewise with a playlist: if I shuffle a playlist of 52 songs, I want those 52 songs to be played in a random order. Not for a random song to be played each time but a random shuffle of that list.
- isitmadeofglass 5y ago
  Not just that though. If you have an iPod filled with 20 albums from your favorite artist and 1 album from 5 others, you wouldn’t be happy even with random excluding previous.
semi-extrinsic 5y ago
The iPod shuffle thing wasn't really about randomness, it was a UX failure. "To shuffle" means a specific thing. If I ask you to shuffle a deck of cards and give it to me so I can draw them one by one, I very much don't expect you to put each card back in the deck and re-shuffle it before every time I draw a new card.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Exactly right. If you shuffle a playlist of 100 songs I expect a random list of 100 unique songs—no repeats.
Jasper_ 5y ago
In casual language, random means not "uniformly random", but something more like "without a discernable pattern". Playing a song from the same album is the start of a discernable pattern.
golergka 5y ago
I used to be a game designer, and I worked on a lot of games with randomness mechanics and I analysed a lot of player feedback. How people at large perceive randomness is NOT what randomness is, of course. A task to create something that is random, and a task to create something that people perceive is random are two very different tasks.
weego 5y ago
I've had to deal with a similar issue for a product. We ended up summarising it in a fuzzy way that people's minds have a notion of 'micro' and 'macro' randomness. In the case the coin flip, all heads or all tails is perfectly fine and will happen in macro random, ie if you took macro to mean > 1 million rolls let's say. But in micro random (the 12 rod we experience in real time) if that were to happen we'd feel uncomfortable and immediately assume it was cheated even if it was a product of true randomness because macro random suffers the same problems as very large numbers of slices of time
delusional 5y ago
Spotify had a blogpost about it back in the day[1]. It was based on prior work that's a bit more general[2]. The basic idea was that you don't really want to randomize, you want to distribute. [1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... [2]: http://keyj.emphy.de/balanced-shuffle/ http://keyj.emphy.de/balanced-shuffle/

tomsmeding 5y ago

I mean, that makes sense. What I want when putting a music player to "shuffle" is not "give me something unpredictable" -- that's fundamentally what randomness means. What I want is "give me something new". Something new is not something random, it's something _different_ from before, if reasonably possible.

sjmm1989 5y ago
Which to a machine may as well be the same thing in either phrasing. You want something different from what you just listened to. To it, anything not 'that song' is different and 'new' potentially if also not 'just listened to' within a certain set amount of songs. Even without that certain set of songs being logged and considered; any picking of a different song from the last is verifiably random. Think of it all like a deck of cards. Shuffle is apt in that sense. You don't expect to see double aces each time you pick through the shuffled deck of cards, but sometimes you do. Sometimes, you also find double jacks, queens and kings; in a row. Sometimes you don't. That deck could be shuffled by the worlds best trick shufflers. Still gonna get doubles now and then. True Randomness is not really technically possible. At least, not with our current technologies available; and we have a lot of aces up our sleeves. The best we can manage for randomness right now, is creating random strings of numbers to serve as the seed for new randomness. At least, if I understand correctly. If I do, then this is why cryptography is so damn important for us in the computational side of things. Network Security requires randomness.
- tomsmeding 5y ago
  If I understand you correctly, I think you missed my point. You're explaining how with true randomness, you get different stuff most of the time and the same stuff some of the time. That is true. But it's not what people want when they press shuffle. What people want is something _different_, and giving the same song twice is not something different. As another commenter wrote, giving multiple (different) songs after each other from the same album would even be undesirable, even if that could occur perfectly well with random shuffling. A human pressing "shuffle" usually doesn't want randomness. They want pleasing _variation_. See e.g. the "Comparison" heading here: https://blog.demofox.org/2017/10/20/generating-blue-noise-sample-points-with-mitchells-best-candidate-algorithm/ https://blog.demofox.org/2017/10/20/generating-blue-noise-sa...
  - Out_of_Characte 5y ago
    This is true for many games as well, their "1%" chance usually means you'll always get lucky twice in a series of 200 attempts
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  You would expect a shuffled deck of 52 unique cards. Not a deck of three 5 of spades. Likewise with a playlist: if I shuffle a playlist of 52 songs, I want those 52 songs to be played in a random order. Not for a random song to be played each time but a random shuffle of that list.
isitmadeofglass 5y ago
Not just that though. If you have an iPod filled with 20 albums from your favorite artist and 1 album from 5 others, you wouldn’t be happy even with random excluding previous.

semi-extrinsic 5y ago

The iPod shuffle thing wasn't really about randomness, it was a UX failure. "To shuffle" means a specific thing. If I ask you to shuffle a deck of cards and give it to me so I can draw them one by one, I very much don't expect you to put each card back in the deck and re-shuffle it before every time I draw a new card.

avgcorrection 5y ago
Exactly right. If you shuffle a playlist of 100 songs I expect a random list of 100 unique songs—no repeats.

Jasper_ 5y ago

In casual language, random means not "uniformly random", but something more like "without a discernable pattern". Playing a song from the same album is the start of a discernable pattern.

golergka 5y ago

I used to be a game designer, and I worked on a lot of games with randomness mechanics and I analysed a lot of player feedback. How people at large perceive randomness is NOT what randomness is, of course. A task to create something that is random, and a task to create something that people perceive is random are two very different tasks.

weego 5y ago

I've had to deal with a similar issue for a product. We ended up summarising it in a fuzzy way that people's minds have a notion of 'micro' and 'macro' randomness. In the case the coin flip, all heads or all tails is perfectly fine and will happen in macro random, ie if you took macro to mean > 1 million rolls let's say. But in micro random (the 12 rod we experience in real time) if that were to happen we'd feel uncomfortable and immediately assume it was cheated even if it was a product of true randomness because macro random suffers the same problems as very large numbers of slices of time

delusional 5y ago

Spotify had a blogpost about it back in the day[1]. It was based on prior work that's a bit more general[2]. The basic idea was that you don't really want to randomize, you want to distribute. [1]: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... [2]: http://keyj.emphy.de/balanced-shuffle/ http://keyj.emphy.de/balanced-shuffle/