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Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

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Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#131

Post by nathan_f77 »

mickronome wrote: post #128
nathan_f77 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a few issues with Spotify doing this. I even saw a post where an engineer claimed it was all psychological, but I was definitely getting repeats when I had queued up a large amount of music (e.g. over 40 hours.) I think they only shuffle a certain percentage of the playlist and forget which songs have already been played after a while. I manually shuffle some playlists now. One nice thing about the desktop clie…

I probably have some details wrong, but according to Spotify's customer feedback site, there at least used to be a couple of issues with their shuffle. One, if I remember somewhat correctly, was that if the player was stopped/shutdown, it forgot the shuffle seed. This would essentially lead to a reshuffle, which would cause duplicate songs for songs played before the unintended reseeding.

Oh ok, yeah that seems to line up with what I experienced. I think it was after closing my laptop, or switching between different devices. I might have to try it again.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#132

Post by morley »

talyian wrote: post #105
Pfhreak wrote: post #4

Interesting, and at first I was excited about the possibilities in something like D&D, where a series of bad rolls can have you feeling down. "I'm due for a critical hit any swing now..." Players would love that! Make my hero feel more heroic! The inevitable comeback! But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful…

In some competitive games like Dota and LoL, the random distribution for critical hits is weighted so that it ramps up over time, resetting after a successful crit. ( http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Random_distribution ) This both reduces the chance of two high rolls coming up twice in a row as well as long periods of low rolls. It doesn't have the "you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure" since "not…

I've heard Blizzard does the same thing for valuable random drops (like legendary drops in Hearthstone and Diablo 3): instead of being random, there's a proc rate so you can't get screwed by chance.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#134

Post by DINKDINK »

nickm12 wrote: post #73

I had the privilege of studying probability from G-C. Rota. One of my favorite quotes from him was "Randomness is not what we expect", which he used to describe the phenomenon of people disbelieving that random data was actually random. Another great was "This will become intuitive to you, once you adjust your intuition to the facts."

A good way to show how the "Randomness is not what we expect" phenomenon manifests is the following.

Given a fair coin that outputs Heads (H) or Tails (T), which of the following sequences is more or less probable

HHTHTT or HHHHHH

Answer: Both are equally probable strings to be generated by the fair coin and each should occur once in every 64 sequences (~1.56%)

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#135

Post by gregmac »

ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

Several years ago I used to use a music service that had a bunch of sliders, something like:

    Favorites:  Normal  Very Frequently

    Artist:  Liked only  Wide variety

    Prefer:  Old  New

    Popularity:  Hits only  Fringe
It was great to be able to customize stations. I don't remember what service it was, but I think it did get purchased and folded into something else.

This was a great way of tweaking the "randomization", and really gets into understanding what people want to hear. In my case, I had different stations/playlists customized in different ways.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#136

Post by surement »

wodenokoto wrote: post #36
michaelmcmillan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually tested the random distribution of Spotify's shuffle functionality: http://michaelmcmillan.net

I have a theory that Spotify doesn't do random shuffling, but weighted shuffling, so that new items are more likely to be at the top of a shuffle (or maybe even popular items). I also believe that this will satisfy users better than true random shuffling. About your linked post: You don't test the randomness of the shuffling, you only test if a shuffled list contain one and only of each original item.

>I have a theory that Spotify doesn't do random shuffling, but weighted shuffling, so that new items are more likely to be at the top of a shuffle

Amazon Music does this and it annoys me. Just because I added something a while ago doesn't mean I want to hear it less.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#137

Post by DINKDINK »

talyian wrote: post #105
Pfhreak wrote: post #4

Interesting, and at first I was excited about the possibilities in something like D&D, where a series of bad rolls can have you feeling down. "I'm due for a critical hit any swing now..." Players would love that! Make my hero feel more heroic! The inevitable comeback! But then I thought about the inverse case -- you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure. Or series of failures. That would feel awful…

In some competitive games like Dota and LoL, the random distribution for critical hits is weighted so that it ramps up over time, resetting after a successful crit. ( http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Random_distribution ) This both reduces the chance of two high rolls coming up twice in a row as well as long periods of low rolls. It doesn't have the "you are doing really well, and now you are due for a failure" since "not…

Fascinating! I wonder if the distribution is engineered like that to avoid specious cheating claims. E.g. Player:"Look at this video of Famous_Player getting 3 crits in a row! They're probably cheating!" So much potential for fallacies; Gambler's Fallacy, Silent Evidence Fallacy..

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#138

Post by surement »

legohead wrote: post #103
ideonexus wrote: post #8

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to he…

back when I used Winamp as my daily player, I was getting annoyed that its "shuffle" kept playing the same songs. and it would play the same songs in a row. so I would hear the songs C,A,F play. then the next day again the sequence would be C,A,F. over time, I would start hearing the melody of the next song before it even started playing. when I finally noticed this and realized that could only mean it's not actually…

Winamp shuffle randomizes without replacement. But you're right, it keeps the same shuffled order until you turn shuffle off and back on.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#139

Post by Thespian2 »

For board games, like "Settlers of Catan" where resources are generated based on rolls of 2d6, one could use an analog version of this with a cup containing 36 chits, of the numbers 2-12 according to the normal distribution, _without_ replacement. You would still get the randomness of ordering, but over 36 draws/turns would get a complete "average" distribution.

If that is a bug or a feature is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy

#140

Post by cletusw »

Thespian2 wrote: post #139

For board games, like "Settlers of Catan" where resources are generated based on rolls of 2d6, one could use an analog version of this with a cup containing 36 chits, of the numbers 2-12 according to the normal distribution, _without_ replacement. You would still get the randomness of ordering, but over 36 draws/turns would get a complete "average" distribution. If that is a bug or a feature is left as an exercise fo…

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/20038/catan-event-cards
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