4 ms·

I appreciate the idea of "content-aware" shuffling, but I wish the author had not stated that random shuffling "lacks fairness and uniform distribution." If tha

by markbnj 12y ago

I appreciate the idea of "content-aware" shuffling, but I wish the author had not stated that random shuffling "lacks fairness and uniform distribution." If that is true then the shuffle isn't very random. People have enough trouble with randomness and its characteristics.

thaumasiotes 12y ago
> I wish the author had not stated that random shuffling "lacks fairness and uniform distribution." If that is true then the shuffle isn't very random. I have no idea what you're trying to say here. The lack of uniform distribution that results from random sampling is well known. The author even specifically elaborates on exactly what he's referring to in the text that immediately follows your quote. Random numbers always clump. What people actually have in mind when they think of "random selection" is almost always a sample that visits every part of the space with roughly equal frequency ("uniform"). See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence . Uniform random selection is "fair" and "uniform" before the selection happens. But not afterward. What this guy, and most music listeners, want is selection that visits every song in a "fair" and "uniform" manner after the selection has happened -- they care about what the result is, not whether certain aspects of the result could have been predicted in advance.
- markbnj 12y ago
  The "clumping" the author refers to is within genres. In a perfect random number generator any of the possible output values is as likely to appear next in the sequence as any other. PRNGs are not perfect, but there is nothing either unfair or non-uniform about two blues tunes showing up next to each other, if they happen to be stored in flat list of songs and indexed by ordinal. I think you need to reread the piece.
- rcxdude 12y ago
  'uniform distribution' is a specific term in statistics which means something separate to what uniform colloquially means, and in discussions like this it's important to distinguish carefully between the terms. (i.e. A uniform distribution is unlikely to be perceived as 'uniform', as you say)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

by markbnj 12y ago

thaumasiotes 12y ago

> I wish the author had not stated that random shuffling "lacks fairness and uniform distribution." If that is true then the shuffle isn't very random. I have no idea what you're trying to say here. The lack of uniform distribution that results from random sampling is well known. The author even specifically elaborates on exactly what he's referring to in the text that immediately follows your quote. Random numbers always clump. What people actually have in mind when they think of "random selection" is almost always a sample that visits every part of the space with roughly equal frequency ("uniform"). See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence . Uniform random selection is "fair" and "uniform" before the selection happens. But not afterward. What this guy, and most music listeners, want is selection that visits every song in a "fair" and "uniform" manner after the selection has happened -- they care about what the result is, not whether certain aspects of the result could have been predicted in advance.

markbnj 12y ago
The "clumping" the author refers to is within genres. In a perfect random number generator any of the possible output values is as likely to appear next in the sequence as any other. PRNGs are not perfect, but there is nothing either unfair or non-uniform about two blues tunes showing up next to each other, if they happen to be stored in flat list of songs and indexed by ordinal. I think you need to reread the piece.
rcxdude 12y ago
'uniform distribution' is a specific term in statistics which means something separate to what uniform colloquially means, and in discussions like this it's important to distinguish carefully between the terms. (i.e. A uniform distribution is unlikely to be perceived as 'uniform', as you say)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]