I remember hearing Apple had to make a "random-seeming to humans" algorithm with the iPod's shuffle feature as well for the same reason. Grabbing a truly random song every play doesn't feel random to humans. What people really want with their song shuffle is something new they haven't played in a while.
How random is xkcd? (2015)
31–40 of 133 posts
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#32I remember hearing Apple had to make a "random-seeming to humans" algorithm with the iPod's shuffle feature as well for the same reason. Grabbing a truly random song every play doesn't feel random to humans. What people really want with their song shuffle is something new they haven't played in a while.
> What people really want with their song shuffle is something new they haven't played in a while.
Speak for yourself
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#33I remember hearing Apple had to make a "random-seeming to humans" algorithm with the iPod's shuffle feature as well for the same reason. Grabbing a truly random song every play doesn't feel random to humans. What people really want with their song shuffle is something new they haven't played in a while.
Random is random, shuffle is shuffle. They are different things.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#34> a random stream of bits should have almost as many ones as zeros almost ??
Yes, almost. They will approach equal as the count approaches infinity. So if ypu ever see a random pick equate to 50/50, the end of the universe is upon us.
Nit, their ratio (bits set/unset) will approach 1 as the count approaches infinity, but the values themselves will not approach equal.
https://gist.github.com/AlexAltea/3aa96efc41f59e80631c346908...
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#35Using the formula in the article: - Out of 1500 comics (at the time of the article), 45 random selections gives you a 48.656% chance of a duplicate, and 46 gives you a 50.196% chance. - Out of 2873 comics (as of right now), 63 random selections gives you a 49.579% chance of a duplicate, and 64 gives you a 50.685% chance. 2929 comics is the most from which randomly selecting 64 will have a greater than 50% chance of h…
Seems like a variation on the birthday paradox.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
You aren't suggesting that something random should be predictable, right?
I read "almost as many" as "not quite as many". In other words, fewer. My mental model is that an unbiased random stream of 1's and 0's should converge on 50% 1's and 50% 0's over time, not 49% 1's and 51% 0's. Looks like it's a language ambiguity thing I'm not quite getting.
Over time, it should be almost 50/50, yeah. What if you got 10000001 random numbers? There's no way it's exactly 50/50 with an uneven amount. It's almost 50/50
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#37Hmmm, I might check how often an m twister gives duplicates.
that was always my complaint with xkcds random, getting the same couple of pages repetitively.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#38For laughs a while ago, I wrote a program to read /dev/urandom and print integers. It can execute between a range and let it print out 200,000 iterations. This is some highlights from executing it using 1 -- 2873 using `sort | uniq -c`:
2873 unique numbers printed, so I got all of them for xkcd as of Dec 28, 2023.
The lowest occurrence of a number 44 unique entries for 332 and 1829.
The largest occurrence of a number was 99 unique entries for 2007 and 2230.
Average occurrence was 69 entries, 134 unique numbers occurred 69 times.
What does this mean to me ? Nothing, but maybe to a mathematician it will mean something :)
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#39I remember hearing Apple had to make a "random-seeming to humans" algorithm with the iPod's shuffle feature as well for the same reason. Grabbing a truly random song every play doesn't feel random to humans. What people really want with their song shuffle is something new they haven't played in a while.
I remember this, and I also remember reading anecdotes online about people listening on shuffle, hearing two songs from the same artist or album in a row, and getting superstitious about it like it was trying to "warn them" something bad was about to happen.
So Apple had to take their generally true random algorithm and make it intentionally less random so it worked like people implicitly expected it to. Makes me wonder how many things we really are "holding wrong" because dev expectations didn't line up with how people actually use something.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#40There actually is a bias - you will never get comic 404 from the random button (see https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/404:_Not_Found )