11 ms·

Kind of an aside to the nerd sniping happening here, but I think the fact that people complain about the random button is a sign that the feature isn’t doing wh

Kind of an aside to the nerd sniping happening here, but I think the fact that people complain about the random button is a sign that the feature isn’t doing what those people really want, even if it is doing what is advertised. Those people _want_ a button biased to return novel ones they haven’t read either in that session or across all time somehow, likely because they are using it to discover new comics.

mjburgess 3y ago
The term `random` is a relative one, X is random wrt to Y, iff P(X|Y) = P(X) Random data is highly patterned regardless. The choice of Y=everything-but-/dev/random is has no special status (ie., P(X|/dev/random) = 1). Better than `random` is set to draw from the long tail of lower-rank-by-view comics. Then Y = the-url / user-preference / ...
aebtebeten 3y ago
If XKCD would not be able to have a feature which is technically but not socially correct, then what webcomic may? The people who learn that random(uncorrelated) is what it is and not what they want are part of today's lucky 10'000
- nevinera 3y ago
  Indeed, if I were running that site, I would now implement the ability to turn on intentional non-randomness for _specific people_, and begin embedding messages in the sequences of comics, or selecting the same two comics 28 times in a row on occasion. Heck, stick the referrer in the session and give everyone coming in from _that blog post_ wildly divergent randomness characteristics :-)
madeofpalk 3y ago
Plainly, it’s the difference between picking one at random, or shuffling a playlist. I think people can intuitively understand the difference between the two.
- saghm 3y ago
  Yeah, I think the word "shuffle" itself indicates what people are actually looking for here; when I shuffle a deck of playing cards, I'm changing the order, but I'm still getting every card exactly once when I deal them. Nobody claims that the deck order isn't random because you can't get the 7 of clubs twice after shuffling it.
madaxe_again 3y ago
Correct conclusion IMO. Many years ago I ran a social network with a focus on art and media, and we had a “show me another” button which picked a random submission to display. People complained that it wasn’t random. Incessantly. So I changed it, to instead maintain a list of previously viewed items for each user, and to exclude them from the results. And that was that. People almost immediately noticed that it had been “fixed”. There’s mathematically perfect, and then there’s user expectations - and ne’er the twain shall meet.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > instead maintain a list of previously viewed items for each user, and to exclude them from the results For something like XKCD this is a very good idea. It mitigates two possible perception problems amongst users: 1. Regular long-term readers who see true random as less so because it seems to show them things they already remember more than novel examples. 2. People who are regular and been around a while, but not for the half the length of the site's long history, because again they'll see less of what they've already seen than they would with true random. The issue for a site like XKCD is the fact that many won't want to be tracked so for them any such effort is wasted. You can store the data in localstorage (it is a feature that can live without needing to track the same user between different devices and UAs) to mitigate the concern, but that is usually blocked by blocking cookies due to it having similar potential for more nefarious activity tracking. To be honest, I'd just not bother. People will still complain anyway!
nullhole 3y ago
Sid Meier talked about this wrt Civilization battle odds: https://youtu.be/bY7aRJE-oOY?t=1101 https://youtu.be/bY7aRJE-oOY?t=1101
- ketzo 3y ago
  Oh man this is an awesome talk, thanks for linking! Quick excerpt: > The player said “I lost a 2:1 battle, and I get that, I know I should lose that sometimes.” > I said, okay, so what’s the problem? > He said “well, I lost a 20:10 battle — what’s up with that?! 20 is so much more than 10!”
  - igiveup 3y ago
    Is that wrong? I don't know the logic of the game, but a 20:10 battle can very well have different odds than a 2:1 one.
    - kemayo 3y ago
      They're talking about ratios of unit-strength, which correlate directly to odds of success in a battle, not to numbers-of-units or anything more fuzzy like that. Given which, 20:10 and 2:1 have identical odds of success.
      - waterhouse 3y ago
        Do they, though? It depends on how the combat works. Suppose, for example, that each side has 5 hit points, and repeatedly you roll a 2:1 die to decide who gets 1 point of damage, until one side reaches 0 hit points. The chance of an "upset", where the weaker side wins, is not 1/3; I compute it to be roughly 14%. If both sides start with 10 hit points, I compute the chance of an upset to be 6.5%. The law of large numbers means that, the more die rolls the combat involves, the less likely an upset is. Or. Suppose that, at each step, one side has N soldiers and the other has M, and repeatedly a random soldier gets a kill; so that's an N/(M+N) chance that the first side gets a kill, and M/(M+N) that it's the other side. This would make advantages compound within the battle. Then I compute that a 2:1 initial matchup has a 5/6 chance (83%) of victory, and a 10:5 matchup has a 98.8% chance of victory. (edit) I guess you could say I'm challenging the idea that "unit strength", such that when strength A fights strength B it's decided in one step with probability A/(A+B), makes sense as an abstract concept. (defmemo meh (a b p) (if (is b 0) 1 (is a 0) 0 (+ (* p (meh a dec.b p)) (* (- 1 p) (meh dec.a b p))))) (defmemo nub (a b) (if (is b 0) 1 (is a 0) 0 (+ (* (/ a (+ a b)) (nub a dec.b)) (* (/ b (+ a b)) (nub dec.a b)))))
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
avianlyric 3y ago
There’s a really good article from Spotify Engineering that looks at exactly how Spotify bridged this gap between “random” and the “random” people actually expect. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... It a good read on understanding what people generally expect when they ask for a random stream of songs (or comics), and how you can meet that expectation by carefully engineering how you generate “random” lists.
- BillyTheMage 3y ago
  Anecdotally, Spotify shuffle is one of the worst shuffles I've ever used. Or at least it used to be, not sure about now since they added Smart Shuffle. At least used to, maybe still, it would play a lot of songs over and over, but never play others. Like it had maybe 100 songs out of 2000 playing regularly, over and over. This isn't just me, but all my friends too. We're all the time finding old songs we saved that have never once been played with shuffle, while it's played this one song 3 times in the same day. Perhaps it doesn't work as well with large playlists? Me and my friends tend toward 1000+ songs in a playlist, but most other playlists I've found are rarely over 250 songs.
  - stronglikedan 3y ago
    Their shuffle is completely broken, but so are all modern streaming music players. It used to be that shuffle would do just that - shuffle the deck of cards (playlist), and then deal the cards in order, never repeating until all cards have been dealt. Now it just keeps the playlist in the same order it was in and jumps all over the place, repeating songs and never playing some. It's very frustrating and woefully broken. Old media players did it correctly.
    - dwringer 3y ago
      Agreed; the suggestion that people just expect random shuffle to work differently from that seems well-meaning and rooted in some kind of truth but quite disconnected from the fact you stated. I'm not sure why media players that offer something other than a true "shuffle" can't just provide the option to have either functionality.
t_mann 3y ago
The button may be 'correct' in its randomness under one meaningful definition of the word (draw the next element uniformly at random from the whole set on each click), but that's not the only plausible definition of randomness here. Another perfectly reasonable definition would be 'cycle through all elements in random order', ie similar to the randomness in a shuffled deck of cards (which is a reasonable analogy for a series of cartoon clips, and perfectly doable even without cookies, at least within the same session). So in this case, you wouldn't even have to sacrifice formal correctness to please your users, you'd just have to pick the right formal model that corresponds to the kind of randomness you want here.
kelthan 3y ago
First off, let me give a shout out to the author of the article. It's quite well written with clear support for the answer he provides. Now back to the thread: It turns out that most people expect "random" to mean a random selection without duplication (at least until the source is exhausted). That is called a non-replacement randomization: once a song (or comic, or whatever), is played/displayed, that item is no longer considered as part of the pool for future selection. However, that requires saving state for the individual user to save which information has been presented to this specific user, which adds a whole lot of additional requirements for cookies, or account registration, or other things that we all generally loathe. The fundamental problem here is that most people don't really understand randomness and probability. If they did, casinos and lotteries would be out of business (see The Gambler's Fallacy[1]). This is not a failure of education, or mental capabilities: it is a fundamental friction with the way that the human brain has evolved. The human brain is fundamentally a pattern matching system. We look for "meaning" by identifying patterns in our world and extrapolating what actions we should take based on those patterns. As such, we assume that _all_ systems have memory because that's how humans learn and take action, so we generally assume everything else does, too. But truly random events have no memory: there are streaks that appear "non-random" to us, such as multiple tails occurring in a streak during a fair-coin flip. But streaks often occur in truly random data, we as humans just don't expect it. The existence of the Feynman Point[2] is an example that even someone well versed in randomness and math thought that a string of six 9's appearing in the value of PI, an irrational number, was something worth noting. [1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gamblersfallacy.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gamblersfallacy.asp [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi
- thrwggrdxvgf 3y ago
  > If they did, casinos and lotteries would be out of business I think you misunderstand the reason many people gamble if you are so sure of this. (But I agree people also don’t really “get” randomness).
bmeow_engineer 3y ago
This happens a lot in game development too. Many games have "random" elements that end up with lots of duplicates as the developer uses a typical random number generator. I've found in games I worked on to make it "feel" random you have to tweak the algorithm to reduce duplicates and make things more evenly distributed.

mjburgess 3y ago

The term `random` is a relative one, X is random wrt to Y, iff P(X|Y) = P(X) Random data is highly patterned regardless. The choice of Y=everything-but-/dev/random is has no special status (ie., P(X|/dev/random) = 1). Better than `random` is set to draw from the long tail of lower-rank-by-view comics. Then Y = the-url / user-preference / ...

aebtebeten 3y ago

If XKCD would not be able to have a feature which is technically but not socially correct, then what webcomic may? The people who learn that random(uncorrelated) is what it is and not what they want are part of today's lucky 10'000

nevinera 3y ago
Indeed, if I were running that site, I would now implement the ability to turn on intentional non-randomness for _specific people_, and begin embedding messages in the sequences of comics, or selecting the same two comics 28 times in a row on occasion. Heck, stick the referrer in the session and give everyone coming in from _that blog post_ wildly divergent randomness characteristics :-)

madeofpalk 3y ago

Plainly, it’s the difference between picking one at random, or shuffling a playlist. I think people can intuitively understand the difference between the two.

saghm 3y ago
Yeah, I think the word "shuffle" itself indicates what people are actually looking for here; when I shuffle a deck of playing cards, I'm changing the order, but I'm still getting every card exactly once when I deal them. Nobody claims that the deck order isn't random because you can't get the 7 of clubs twice after shuffling it.

madaxe_again 3y ago

Correct conclusion IMO. Many years ago I ran a social network with a focus on art and media, and we had a “show me another” button which picked a random submission to display. People complained that it wasn’t random. Incessantly. So I changed it, to instead maintain a list of previously viewed items for each user, and to exclude them from the results. And that was that. People almost immediately noticed that it had been “fixed”. There’s mathematically perfect, and then there’s user expectations - and ne’er the twain shall meet.

dspillett 3y ago
> instead maintain a list of previously viewed items for each user, and to exclude them from the results For something like XKCD this is a very good idea. It mitigates two possible perception problems amongst users: 1. Regular long-term readers who see true random as less so because it seems to show them things they already remember more than novel examples. 2. People who are regular and been around a while, but not for the half the length of the site's long history, because again they'll see less of what they've already seen than they would with true random. The issue for a site like XKCD is the fact that many won't want to be tracked so for them any such effort is wasted. You can store the data in localstorage (it is a feature that can live without needing to track the same user between different devices and UAs) to mitigate the concern, but that is usually blocked by blocking cookies due to it having similar potential for more nefarious activity tracking. To be honest, I'd just not bother. People will still complain anyway!

nullhole 3y ago

Sid Meier talked about this wrt Civilization battle odds: https://youtu.be/bY7aRJE-oOY?t=1101 https://youtu.be/bY7aRJE-oOY?t=1101

ketzo 3y ago
Oh man this is an awesome talk, thanks for linking! Quick excerpt: > The player said “I lost a 2:1 battle, and I get that, I know I should lose that sometimes.” > I said, okay, so what’s the problem? > He said “well, I lost a 20:10 battle — what’s up with that?! 20 is so much more than 10!”
- igiveup 3y ago
  Is that wrong? I don't know the logic of the game, but a 20:10 battle can very well have different odds than a 2:1 one.
  - kemayo 3y ago
    They're talking about ratios of unit-strength, which correlate directly to odds of success in a battle, not to numbers-of-units or anything more fuzzy like that. Given which, 20:10 and 2:1 have identical odds of success.
    - waterhouse 3y ago
      Do they, though? It depends on how the combat works. Suppose, for example, that each side has 5 hit points, and repeatedly you roll a 2:1 die to decide who gets 1 point of damage, until one side reaches 0 hit points. The chance of an "upset", where the weaker side wins, is not 1/3; I compute it to be roughly 14%. If both sides start with 10 hit points, I compute the chance of an upset to be 6.5%. The law of large numbers means that, the more die rolls the combat involves, the less likely an upset is. Or. Suppose that, at each step, one side has N soldiers and the other has M, and repeatedly a random soldier gets a kill; so that's an N/(M+N) chance that the first side gets a kill, and M/(M+N) that it's the other side. This would make advantages compound within the battle. Then I compute that a 2:1 initial matchup has a 5/6 chance (83%) of victory, and a 10:5 matchup has a 98.8% chance of victory. (edit) I guess you could say I'm challenging the idea that "unit strength", such that when strength A fights strength B it's decided in one step with probability A/(A+B), makes sense as an abstract concept. (defmemo meh (a b p) (if (is b 0) 1 (is a 0) 0 (+ (* p (meh a dec.b p)) (* (- 1 p) (meh dec.a b p))))) (defmemo nub (a b) (if (is b 0) 1 (is a 0) 0 (+ (* (/ a (+ a b)) (nub a dec.b)) (* (/ b (+ a b)) (nub dec.a b)))))

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

avianlyric 3y ago

There’s a really good article from Spotify Engineering that looks at exactly how Spotify bridged this gap between “random” and the “random” people actually expect. https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... It a good read on understanding what people generally expect when they ask for a random stream of songs (or comics), and how you can meet that expectation by carefully engineering how you generate “random” lists.

BillyTheMage 3y ago
Anecdotally, Spotify shuffle is one of the worst shuffles I've ever used. Or at least it used to be, not sure about now since they added Smart Shuffle. At least used to, maybe still, it would play a lot of songs over and over, but never play others. Like it had maybe 100 songs out of 2000 playing regularly, over and over. This isn't just me, but all my friends too. We're all the time finding old songs we saved that have never once been played with shuffle, while it's played this one song 3 times in the same day. Perhaps it doesn't work as well with large playlists? Me and my friends tend toward 1000+ songs in a playlist, but most other playlists I've found are rarely over 250 songs.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Their shuffle is completely broken, but so are all modern streaming music players. It used to be that shuffle would do just that - shuffle the deck of cards (playlist), and then deal the cards in order, never repeating until all cards have been dealt. Now it just keeps the playlist in the same order it was in and jumps all over the place, repeating songs and never playing some. It's very frustrating and woefully broken. Old media players did it correctly.
  - dwringer 3y ago
    Agreed; the suggestion that people just expect random shuffle to work differently from that seems well-meaning and rooted in some kind of truth but quite disconnected from the fact you stated. I'm not sure why media players that offer something other than a true "shuffle" can't just provide the option to have either functionality.

t_mann 3y ago

The button may be 'correct' in its randomness under one meaningful definition of the word (draw the next element uniformly at random from the whole set on each click), but that's not the only plausible definition of randomness here. Another perfectly reasonable definition would be 'cycle through all elements in random order', ie similar to the randomness in a shuffled deck of cards (which is a reasonable analogy for a series of cartoon clips, and perfectly doable even without cookies, at least within the same session). So in this case, you wouldn't even have to sacrifice formal correctness to please your users, you'd just have to pick the right formal model that corresponds to the kind of randomness you want here.

kelthan 3y ago

First off, let me give a shout out to the author of the article. It's quite well written with clear support for the answer he provides. Now back to the thread: It turns out that most people expect "random" to mean a random selection without duplication (at least until the source is exhausted). That is called a non-replacement randomization: once a song (or comic, or whatever), is played/displayed, that item is no longer considered as part of the pool for future selection. However, that requires saving state for the individual user to save which information has been presented to this specific user, which adds a whole lot of additional requirements for cookies, or account registration, or other things that we all generally loathe. The fundamental problem here is that most people don't really understand randomness and probability. If they did, casinos and lotteries would be out of business (see The Gambler's Fallacy[1]). This is not a failure of education, or mental capabilities: it is a fundamental friction with the way that the human brain has evolved. The human brain is fundamentally a pattern matching system. We look for "meaning" by identifying patterns in our world and extrapolating what actions we should take based on those patterns. As such, we assume that _all_ systems have memory because that's how humans learn and take action, so we generally assume everything else does, too. But truly random events have no memory: there are streaks that appear "non-random" to us, such as multiple tails occurring in a streak during a fair-coin flip. But streaks often occur in truly random data, we as humans just don't expect it. The existence of the Feynman Point[2] is an example that even someone well versed in randomness and math thought that a string of six 9's appearing in the value of PI, an irrational number, was something worth noting. [1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gamblersfallacy.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gamblersfallacy.asp [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_nines_in_pi

thrwggrdxvgf 3y ago
> If they did, casinos and lotteries would be out of business I think you misunderstand the reason many people gamble if you are so sure of this. (But I agree people also don’t really “get” randomness).

bmeow_engineer 3y ago

This happens a lot in game development too. Many games have "random" elements that end up with lots of duplicates as the developer uses a typical random number generator. I've found in games I worked on to make it "feel" random you have to tweak the algorithm to reduce duplicates and make things more evenly distributed.