Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites? 524
marksilverman writes "Steven Levy at Newsweek is reporting that his iPod Shuffle seems to favor certain songs. Is Apple receiving kickbacks to promote certain artists? Apple denies it, of course, and Levy had the good sense to ask a mathmatician and a cryptographer who explained that it's probably just humans finding patterns where there are none." Less neurotically, both CNet and PCWorld have discussions of the Shuffle's interior spaces.
Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
Means you need to steal better music, of course
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
Ob. Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
I have heard YMCA an inordinate amount of times on my ipod shuffle. I wonder what that means.
Well, let's just say my response is likely to end with "not that there's anything wrong with that"
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now that you mention it... (Score:5, Funny)
That's no need to feel down.
humans are wired to... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:5, Interesting)
const int song_id=random()%num_songs;
At a first glance, that might look reasonable; however, once you start to get a lot of songs (and you start to approach RAND_MAX), it will skew your result in favor of low-ID songs.
Who knows if anything is going on here, though.
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you need to randomize an array, the easiest way to do it is to assign each item a random number, and then sort the array using the random numbers as a key. That way every item occurs only once in the randomized list.
You still need a decent pseudo random number generator of course, if you're using a pseudo random number generator that only produces 5 discrete values and repeats them over and over it doesn't help much.
On the other hand, for an application like a playlist shuffle, you don't need a cryptographically secure RNG, just a PRNG (such as a Mersenne Twister), that uses the current time in milliseconds as a seed would do nicely.
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I beg to differ! (Score:4, Informative)
I was once brought in to fix an application that randomly picked people to pee in a bottle, and a few dozen people complained that they got picked a lot more than other people (out of about 300.) Well it seems that the 'programmer' that coded the app used two digit precision on all math calls (the coder was generally assigned to fiscal apps, two decimal places in money = two decimal places in his head.)
For those not reading between the lines, a random number returns a real number somewhere between 0 and 1, this real number is then multiplied by the maximum number in your expected range to come up with a random number between 0 and your top number (300 in this instance) but since he was using 2 digits of precision (ie, two digits after the decimal place) all the random function returned was
I figure it has something to do with the random number generator in the baby-iPod.
Re:I beg to differ! (Score:3, Funny)
I was once brought in to fix an application that randomly picked people to pee in a bottle, and...
Hey, can I get a copy of that code?
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:3, Informative)
Worse than that. Many implementations of rand() have extremely un-random low-order bits, so the above code will produce both predictable and unevenly weighted selection. It's much better to do
const int song_id = (int)((random()*(long long)num_songs)/RAND_MAX);
(long long cast required be
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps Apple would care to realise that their 'star' ratings have more use than just excluding songs from playlists?
Hell, WMP recognises which songs you prefer at what times of the week. For a company so focused
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:3, Interesting)
in junior high school. And I made a substantial
amount of money (for that time), until my school
mates got tired of losing their lunch money AND
their video game money. The technique is quite
simple, really, but I'll never reveal my secret.
Any technique that Apple uses to generate a
pseudo-random playlist hopefully employes a
PRNG and a seed number generated by better
entropy gathering than something like a master
song list. Otherwise, distinct and repeatable
pattern
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:5, Interesting)
The "clustering illusion" (I never knew there was a name for it) has some interesting applications in real life. Dice in a casino is probably the most obvious example, but things get more interesting as the field gets lower; like, say, 1 and 0. This example applies decently to MMORPGs, where things like whether or not you strike your foe, or whether or not you gain in a skill, are based on your skill times some sort of random number. I was a hardcore addict of Ultima Online for a few years, and one of the common complaints was "I have a skill level of X, but I failed to land a hit on my opponent Y times in a row, something is wrong!"
I guess the next time my UO addiction recurs, I'll have a valid explanation for that phenomenon.
(Would have posted this about 3 hours ago, but Slashdot went down, or something, and I lost my original comment. Had to rewrite from memory.)
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, I just opened Winamp to test this out and it knows I'm blabbing about it and it's playing music I have not heard in a while.
Re:humans are wired to... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hit Play when shuffle's enabled, and it will shuffle the playlist before commencing playback. You're guaranteed not to get repeats until the playlist loops. The other benefit is that you can skip forward and back through the shuffled playlist normally. Mine often randomly picks 4 or 5 songs in a row that go well together, so I'm able to skip back and listen to those in that order when I like.
If... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If... (Score:2)
Also acceptable: "Where the Jobs have gone"
A Modest Proposal (Score:3, Funny)
Perhaps you could remove it from your iPod Shuffle loadout?
Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't stop him from submitting it to Slashdot though. No facts? Great, put it on the front page!
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Well, it wasn't just that. He also had a dumb spelling mistake ("mathmatician"). That helps. I wonder if they'll use that in the dupe.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, shut up! It's a new post and it's NOT a dupe. Let's not push our luck, OK?
enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
I explained this phenomenon to Temple University prof John Allen Paulos, an expert in applying mathematical theory to everyday life. His conclusion: it's entirely possible that nothing at all is amiss with the shuffle function
The slashdot article??
Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites?
and
Apple denies it, of course
Enough with the inflammatory headlines!
Re:enough! (Score:2)
I've never figured if this was just a programming mistake or limitation, or if it was actually intentional.
Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
This post brought to you by Teenage Angst and Caffeine!
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know I am being simplistic but that is the way I would do it.
Your shuffle are belong to us... get it?
Have a good one.
Dude, I've seen this article before. (Score:5, Funny)
Ipod - The little white box of prophecy (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps Ipod will predict when Hewy Lewis and the news will make a mainstream comeback?
Re:Ipod - The little white box of prophecy (Score:2)
Um... Apple depends upon the Power of Marketing, not the Power of Love.
Nail on the head! (Score:5, Funny)
Those of you that think that sounds completely plausable, please step to the left. Everyone else please step to the right.
Everyone standing on the left, please drink the magic juice we're distributing because you've been selected to come with us to the great beyond where you will experience another plane of being.
Everyone on the right, enjoy the rest of your life because you enjoy logic and reason.
Re:Nail on the head! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nail on the head! (Score:5, Funny)
Make your own (Score:3, Funny)
Then, you can offer apple $100,000.00 and see if they'll add you to their magic artist array!
Of course, you might have to pay out to the other artists on it, too, since you'd be decreasing their play frequency by 2/3 of a percent...
Re:Nail on the head! (Score:5, Insightful)
Look up the word "payola" if you think that record execs wouldn't do this.
It doesn't need to be in the shuffle. It could be part of the AutoFill in iTunes.
Do I think it's really happening? Not really. Do I think it's plausible? Yeah... experience with radio tells me that record companies would do this if Apple let them.. and who is Apple to turn down money?
Statistics can tell you a lot about yourself .... (Score:5, Interesting)
> You're absolutely right!@ There's an array inside the iPod shuffle of about 150 artists that will take precedence over all other artists.
Back in late 2001, I wrote a simple program which learns which songs I press "Next(b)" before it completes. Finally after 8 weeks, I realized that I listen to- Eminem and other rap in the morning
- Pop music later into the afternoon
- Rock was for the 5-7 pm slots
- After 10 , it was usually playing Enigma and instrumentals
Was quite different on a weekend with no music on saturdays and often slow Elvis songs on sunday afternoonsRe:Statistics can tell you a lot about yourself .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Do I have to hand in my geek membership card for admitting that I use WMP?
-Montag
Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:5, Informative)
Who knows, maybe Apple uses the meta data for a song to determine the random order (anyone hack it yet and finding the algo?) and some people just get "lucky" like prof John Allen Paulos explained in the article. You might happen to flip 6 heads in a row (despite being a 1 in 64 chance of it happening) and you might get 6 songs from an artist in a row.
Sounds to me that it's a conspiracy theory at best.
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:5, Informative)
Intel has been including hardware RNGs in their chipsets for a while now. Apparently, this is a truly quantum random number generator, although that could be so much marketing material [intel.com]. A quick Google doesn't turn up any obvious pages disputing this, although I didn't look too hard. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has more info.
More rand# gens (Score:2, Informative)
There are some quality random number generators on the Internet like Random.org [random.org], HotBits [forumilab.ch], and Lavarnd [lavarnd.org]. But to be technical, their numbers come from background radio noise, radioactive decay, and lava lamps (er, "Lava Lite lamps"), meaning they don't truly generate it on the chip.
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:2)
http://home.comcast.net/~andrex/hardware-RNG/ [comcast.net]
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:5, Informative)
Right, but wrong.
A pure computational method for generating randomness has not been found...and I'd guess it can't be done.
However, there are a vast number of randomly timed things that happen in a computer. Your mouse movements have some level of randomness, the time between key strokes on your keyboard, etc.
There are ways to harness events which contain levels of randomness and use them to generate truly random numbers. I highly doubt that the ipod firmware really does this...since there are plenty of "random enough" algorithms for such a purpose.
I'll just bet you really wanted to know that too.
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:2)
On the contrary, I think there are lots of these. Digits in pi, for example. The problem with that is that it's easily reproducible, and so useless for encryption, but would work fine for shuffling tracks (use some seed based on time, say, to give an offset so that it won't do the same sequence ea
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're not a programmer, try to imagine writing out a mathematical equation which, when evaluated, comes out to a random numbe
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:2)
No shit.
But they can gather entropy from lots of sources. For example, the timing of user interactions.
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Obligatory random != pseudo random (Score:4, Informative)
anti-spoken word (Score:5, Informative)
This is also useful to take long tracks out of random selection. A friend retagged Pink Floyd's 23 minute long 'Echos' as a book after getting pissed off that his Shuffle always seemed to select it.
Re:anti-spoken word (Score:5, Interesting)
That way, you have a lot more control over what songs get selected and - to tell you the truth - it's a lot more flexible than the autofill feature (it's sort of like discovering perl for the first time -- yeah, it's a lot more clumsy than just whipping up a simple shell script but it's also so much more powerful).
Basically, what I have a bunch of custom smart playlists. The first randomly selects songs that are :
- longer than 1:20
- not comedy, spoken word or audio books (I enjoy listening to George Carlin's rants as much as the next guy but I really don't need to listen to them when I'm out running)
- not longer than 8:00 (this excludes all jam songs etc.)
- hasn't been played in three days (to keep things fresh)
- are not named intro, interlude or skit (for obvious reasons), plus some very custom stuff.
Then I have a second smart playlist select some my favorite songs that I haven't listened to in a while (5 days).I use the 1st playlist to fill my Shuffle up to 75% capacity. The second playlist gets to use the remaining 25%.
You know, I used to think of all these software jukeboxes as bloatware. And whilst iTunes is undoubtedly quite demanding ressource-wise, I really believe it's well worth it. It's powerful and fun to use at the same time.
Terrible Summary... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory Familly Guy Quote.... (Score:4, Funny)
A new study reveals that, no they cannot."
Playlists (Score:2)
With the iPod Shuffle, there's fewer songs, and it's more likely that the user would wan
Reminds me of another discussion... (Score:5, Interesting)
The basic consensus in the discussion was either "dude, your entire playlist is songs you like, of course it's gonna be a good mix.," or, the option mentioned above about humans looking for patterns.
Although, throughout my history of having large (over 1000 song) playlists, I've found that no matter what mp3 player I used (hardware, software, or otherwise), there always seemed to be certain bands or artists that would get play more often. I've had weeks at a time where I'd hear Snoop Dogg's Lodi Dodi, Iron Maiden's Quest for Fire or In Flames' Clayman nearly every time I picked up my iPod
Re:Reminds me of another discussion... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, there is ways of analysing the song to figure out what type of song it is -- There is actually a very intelligent professor [cs.uvic.ca] at my local University [www.uvic.ca] that has developed an algorithm/program that can tell with a pretty good idea what type of
It's the nonpareil effect (Score:5, Informative)
When looking at the candies through the side of the glass jar, the first thing you notice is that the distribution of red and green candies doesn't look evenly distributed at all. Instead, there are lots of areas where many red candies are adjacent, and lots of areas where many green candies are adjacent.
For a long time, many people thought there must be some kind of static electrical effect present that was causing candies of the same color to tend to stick together. Eventually, however, some statisticians did the math and found that there was no such effect at play -- in a completely random system, such "blobs" of like colors are inevitable. Indeed, a jar of candy with no such blobs would be a bit suspect -- what are the chances of the red and green candies always pairing up so that no groupings occur?
To put it another way: it's all in your heads, guys.
Re:It's the nonpareil effect (Score:3)
Um.. considering there are only two colors, it doesn't take a statistician to tell you that there are going to be candies of the same color next to each other.
Unless you mixed the candies into a checkerboard pattern... which isn't random at all, now is it?
OT, but I didn't get a chance to ask.... (Score:2)
Slow news night? (Score:5, Insightful)
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
I concur. There HAVE to be better submissions in the queue than month-old crap that wasn't even all that interesting the first time around.
Ah well. At least it's not a dupe...
p
Don't know about the iPod Shuffle... (Score:2)
Re:Don't know about the iPod Shuffle... (Score:2)
There IS something to this (Score:2)
Only one way to be sure (Score:2)
People are really good at spotting patterns, even when there isn't one - which is why you have to step back and find out what is instead of setting out to prove something.
Dilbert (Score:5, Funny)
Accounting Troll: "Over here we have our random number generator"
Number Generator Troll: "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine"
Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?"
Accounting Troll: "That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure"
I've been using XMMS for years... (Score:2)
the notion of randomness (Score:2, Interesting)
It may be just me... (Score:2)
[meta/ot] Us, the editors (Score:4, Insightful)
What's really interesting, that even though this is a geek site, we can't even get mathematician right. Even more silly is if you check the link above from google, you'll see that the first two results (of 3) are also from right here at the dot.
All I'm saying is: if it's power to the nerd masses, let's do it. Many posts so far are already complaining about the story. Not to mention it's from MSNBC. Not to mention I've already read it, because it's from almost four weeks ago.
I realize I am off-topic and complaining, but I wanted to see if we couldn't get a discussion going about a smarter, more democratic way to elect submissions to go live.
Re:[meta/ot] Us, the editors (Score:2, Offtopic)
Just look at the number of story dupes, the opinion pieces submitted as news stories, and the "worse than awful" (if I may quote Starbuck), sentence structure, grammar, spelling and general mangling of the English language that comes FROM the so-called "editors".
You might as well ask a religious fanatic to have a logical and thoughtful discussion regarding the non-existence of God.
shuffling is not as easy as it sounds (Score:5, Interesting)
So before dismissing thousands of people, I'd entertain the idea that Apple's engineers simply stuffed up. It wouldn't be the first bug that slips through QA testing.
umm yeahhhhhh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:umm yeahhhhhh (Score:3, Insightful)
1) reassure customer purchase was right one
2) ???????
3) profit
Random order versus random selection? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The birthday paradox states that if there are 23 people in a room then there is a slightly more than 50:50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. For 60 or more people, the probability is greater than 99%. This is not a paradox in the sense of it leading to a logical contradiction; it is a paradox in the sense that it is a mathematical truth that contradicts common intuition. Most people estimate that the chance is much lower than 50:50."
Applied here, suppose you have 365 songs. How many random selections must be played before you have about a 50:50 chance of hearing a repeat? Just 23 songs.
What most people want is not random selection, but random order.
my iPod shuffle tends to play more from 2 bands. (Score:3, Funny)
I have a 1GB iPod shuffle, currently it contains roughly 100 songs.
My iPod shuffle "prefers" playing BAD RELIGION and SLAYER.
I don't know how or why.
Maybe you guys can help me figure this out.
here's the breakdown:
100 tracks (roughly)
40 BAD RELIGION's song
40 SLAYER's song
20 of other bands
THIS IS REALLY FRUSTRATING that the iPod shuffle prefers playing SLAYER and BAD RELIGION.
HELP!!!!!!!
(***casm mode ends)
Slashdot Shuffle (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Shuffle (TM) system for the articles they post.
It would explain the dupes and the lack of quality control with one theory.
I keed, I keed
Shuffling and randomness (Score:5, Interesting)
for i in range(array_length):
j = random() % array_length
temp = array[i]
array[i] = array[j]
array[j] = temp
This code does NOT produce all permutations with equal probability! Instead, you must use the following code:
for i in range(array_length):
j = i + (random() % (array_length - i))
temp = array[i]
array[i] = array[j]
array[j] = temp
}
This was cribbed from c2 -- see the full article text here [c2.com] for a more informative discussion.
Second, I see a lot of people saying "I have a 20GB iPod -- and I swear sometimes it just NEVER plays this one song." Okay, let's assume that a 20GB iPod holds 5000 mp3 files. What's the probability that you play 5000 songs in shuffle mode, and never hear a particular song?
It's the probability that 5000 times in a row, you hear some other song -- that is, one of the 4999 other songs. Calculating, we get:
(4999/5000)^5000 = 0.3678.
So we have a 36% probability of this happening -- which is not a negligible amount! This will further be compounded by two things: First, you have no way of recalling exactly it has been since you heard a particular song -- if your favorite song was played 1000 songs earlier, it probably feels like 2000. If it feels like 2000, it's probably 4000. Because it's a favorite song, your mind will exaggerate the amount. It's like if you crave nicotine, it can feel like days since you've had a cigarette when it's only been hours. Second, you probably have a lot of songs you would call a "favorite" -- with each having a 36% chance of not being played over the course of 5000 plays, your mind will probably register that at least one of them is "feeling neglected."
Probability is a strange and beautiful thing. Don't expect your average audiophile to understand it. (And I'm not claiming to understand it either, beyond a very cursory level.)
- shadowmatter
Re:Shuffling and randomness (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the probability that 5000 times in a row, you hear some other song -- that is, one of the 4999 other songs. Calculating, we get:
(4999/5000)^5000 = 0.3678.
Almost forgot -- I thought this number looked familiar. Note that as your number of songs approaches infinity, this number approaches 1/e (approx 0.3678, as seen above). Furthermore, this bound is being approached from below:
(1/2)^2 = 0.25
(2/3)^3 = 0.296
(3/4)^4 = 0.316
So even if you keep ripping or downloading more songs, you're not going to decrease the chance of this phenomenon. Note how likely it is to occur regardless of how many songs you have -- which explains why everyone has probably "experienced" it.
See, probability really is beautiful
- shadowmatter
Unscientific (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, if you just put together a playlist with a bunch of artists and play it, it is entirely likely that someone will be played three times in the first hour. And in this guy's case, that someone was Steely Dan. So what does that prove?
About 500 years ago, we invented something called the "scientific method". Although it is taught to most people in both science and history classes, few seem to understand it.
The scientific method says that you cannot use past observations to make a conclusion. You must develop a specific test to prove or disprove your hypothesis. You must show before you perform the test that the outcome of the test is relevant to your hypothesis. You can then perform the test and use the results to back your conclusion.
The scientific method could very easily be applied here. What this guy needs to do is start with the prediction that Steely Dan or whoever will be played three times in the first hour. He must use statistics to compute the probability of this happenning in a purely random shuffle, and should show that the chances are less than 1% (this is a pretty straight-forward use of standard statistical methods). Then he should run the experiment and see what happens.
My guess? Steely Dan will not play three times in the first hour.
Without a proper scientific experiment proving this guy's theory, there is no story here.
People don't WANT true randomness (Score:3)
People don't want true randomness. If the machine picked each song to play randomly and independently, then it might play the same song twice in a row; and it might never play a song.
Instead, what people seem to want is to hear all of their music, in an unpredictable order. And that's a random shuffle. (Hence the name!) Each individual track selection depends on the previous ones.
That's also fairly easy to do too, of course. But most of the simple algorithms will assume that the set of songs is fixed... It's much harder to keep an even shuffle when adding or removing songs from the set. Maybe this is one cause of the 'problem'?
Nice. (Score:5, Funny)
Did marksilverman, a slashdot poster, kill a puppy to get an erection? marksilverman denies it, OF COURSE.
it's shuffle, not random. (Score:3, Insightful)
whereas a random play function could lead to a single track being played twice as often as another, shuffle precludes that.
hence the name, rather than "iPod Random".
This reminds me (Score:3, Funny)
"Excuse, me," I said, "I'm going out to buy a lottery ticket."
Re:Apple plays favorites with song formats (Score:2)
Re:Probably... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Probably... (Score:5, Informative)
I noticed that screens towards the top end of the scale seemed to show up more than screens towards the bottom (ie. if you had twenty images, images one to ten would should up more than eleven to twenty). I did some sort of multipass algorithm to stop this happening - I forget exactly what I did now and the source is lost, but I definitely had to change things to make it acceptable.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Irrelevant (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Conspiracy theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Conspiracy theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:From TFA: Apple's profit margin (Score:5, Insightful)
By supporting Apple, you're also supporting R & D for much of the entire personal computing industry.