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How random is xkcd? (2015)

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Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#41

Post by GuB-42 »

jalada wrote: post #13

Reminds me of Spotify's post about shuffling songs: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...

I actually how people do purposefully non-random randomness more interesting. Like in this article.

Video games are known to cheat a lot, usually in the player's favor. The Tetris randomizer for instance is well documented. Early games drew pieces truly randomly, but now, the standard is to draw randomly from a bag of all 7 pieces until it is empty, then repeat, limiting flood and draught. Along the way, other algorithms have been used with the same purpose.

But sometimes, even the numbers are fake, for example, a 95% success rate may be closer to 99% in reality because it matches more closely what players feel 95% should be like.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#42

Post by uxp8u61q »

ahoka wrote: post #33
hbn wrote: post #31

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.

Random is random, shuffle is shuffle. They are different things.

"Random" doesn't necessarily mean "uniformly distributed random." Shuffling a deck of cards randomly is random, but you're not going to get the same card twice in a row, or even the same card twice until you go through the whole deck.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#43

Post by uxp8u61q »

hbn wrote: post #31

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.

Grabbing a new song with probabilities weights based on past outcomes is just as "truly random" as picking a new song with a uniform distribution on all songs every time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_process

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#44

Post by Semaphor »

GuB-42 wrote: post #41
jalada wrote: post #13

Reminds me of Spotify's post about shuffling songs: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...

I actually how people do purposefully non-random randomness more interesting. Like in this article. Video games are known to cheat a lot, usually in the player's favor. The Tetris randomizer for instance is well documented. Early games drew pieces truly randomly, but now, the standard is to draw randomly from a bag of all 7 pieces until it is empty, then repeat, limiting flood and draught. Along the way, other algori…

I once wrote a small script (in C#) to pick a few tens out of a few 1000s. I got weird repeats. I switched to a cryptographically secure RNG, and the repeats were gone. It was probably pure chance, but I stopped using the normal random function ever since ;)

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#45

Post by BillyTheMage »

avianlyric wrote: post #30
mattnewton wrote: post #3

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.

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-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 gene…

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.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#46

Post by physicles »

Semaphor wrote: post #44
GuB-42 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually how people do purposefully non-random randomness more interesting. Like in this article. Video games are known to cheat a lot, usually in the player's favor. The Tetris randomizer for instance is well documented. Early games drew pieces truly randomly, but now, the standard is to draw randomly from a bag of all 7 pieces until it is empty, then repeat, limiting flood and draught. Along the way, other algori…

I once wrote a small script (in C#) to pick a few tens out of a few 1000s. I got weird repeats. I switched to a cryptographically secure RNG, and the repeats were gone. It was probably pure chance, but I stopped using the normal random function ever since ;)

Do you still have your original code? Finding out if the weird repeats were real, and especially why, would make a super interesting blog post.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#47

Post by saghm »

madeofpalk wrote: post #21
mattnewton wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#48

Post by stronglikedan »

BillyTheMage wrote: post #45
avianlyric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-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 gene…

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 h…

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.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#49

Post by ketzo »

nullhole wrote: post #28
mattnewton wrote: post #3

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.

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

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!”

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#50

Post by captaincrisp »

BillyTheMage wrote: post #45
avianlyric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-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 gene…

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 h…

That seems like the real problem with Spotify shuffle. The thing that feels un-random about it is that it plays the exact same songs over and over again despite the humongous size of the playlist. It's not that it plays the same artist, or that every once in a while you get a repeat song. Once you get one repeat they're all repeats.

I wish it would randomly pick the next song from the entire playlist whenever it changed songs.

Though as you say it might already be doing this now. I don't remember feeling like I'm rotating through the same 30 or so songs recently. But also I did start working around it, so I may just not be noticing.

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