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How random is xkcd? (2015)
51–60 of 133 posts
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#52Reminds 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…
The new Baldur's Gate game has a setting called "karmic dice", where it apparently biases the dice rolls to not cause repeated outcomes as much (i.e. if you're passing checks a lot, it will start to bias towards lower results, and if you're failing checks a lot, it will start to bias towards higher results). They devs made the interesting decision to have that setting on by default, which I'm guessing is based on the experience they expect more players to want. Regardless of my own preference, I think it's pretty cool they made that an explicit setting that players can choose to keep on or turn off.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#53Earlier 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…
Just from reading the article you can see how bad it is, and it makes sense that it would be worse for larger playlists. They've completely discounted the fact that when you play large playlists, you don't listen to the whole thing. The problem with the dithering comparison is that in dithering, you're looking at the whole image at the same time. But nobody listens to a long playlist all at once.
First of all, the core idea that Same Artist == Similar Song and Different Artist == Dissimilar Song is already flawed. There are just way, way more axes than that. Getting 4 slow songs in a row in a playlist of mixed slow & fast dance music is going to feel very bad for everyone.
They give each artist one single "random offset". If this is uniform over [start, end], then it would absolutely kill artists that show up a lot on your playlist, dramatically in favor of artists you have once or twice. If it's from [start, end/N] with N being the number of songs of that artist, it would be a little better, but it's still making the playlist behavior completely different at the start (where it's mostly completely random) from the middle/end (where it's "dithered"). If it's [start, end/M] with M being anything else, it's again dramatically favoring the artists with fewer songs on the playlist.
Instead, they could introduce a "ghost" song for each artist that gets shuffled in and then discarded (or possibly some small constant number of ghosts).
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#54Kind 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.
The button may be 'correct' in its randomness under one meaningful definition of the word (draw the next element uniformly at random from the whole set on each click), but that's not the only plausible definition of randomness here. Another perfectly reasonable definition would be 'cycle through all elements in random order', ie similar to the randomness in a shuffled deck of cards (which is a reasonable analogy for a series of cartoon clips, and perfectly doable even without cookies, at least within the same session). So in this case, you wouldn't even have to sacrifice formal correctness to please your users, you'd just have to pick the right formal model that corresponds to the kind of randomness you want here.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#55Earlier 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…
This is precisely why I stopped using Spotify. The random was also horrible as you start to "like" songs, those songs continue to show up during random which isn't random at all. Of all of the vast number of songs Spotify claims WTF am I hearing the same ones over and over. If I wanted that, I'd tune into the radio!
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 brok…
Agreed; the suggestion that people just expect random shuffle to work differently from that seems well-meaning and rooted in some kind of truth but quite disconnected from the fact you stated. I'm not sure why media players that offer something other than a true "shuffle" can't just provide the option to have either functionality.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#57I 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.
People are pattern seeking, even in "random" data.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#58Kind 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
"Player psychology has absolutely nothing to do with rational thought ... the attacking unit has a strength of 1.5, and the defending unit has a strength of 0.5. So the attacking unit should win 3 times for every 1 time the defending unit wins. It's 3:1. That's just math. That's what the math says."
Wow, I liked Sid Meyer a lot more before I listened to that arrogant diatribe about how stupid his players are and about how his decisions are unarguable Math-God-Given conclusions that you'd have to be A Stupid Irrational Loser to disagree with. Fuck you, Sid. You can design your game any way you want. Don't blame shitty game design on math; math didn't make you decide that combat strength should map linearly to odds of winning. That's a shit-ass combat system and not any more mathematically pure than "biggest number always wins", or using a health system like later games did. The audacity to stand up in front of people and lament how he had to get his pure, beautiful game all dirty because of the irrationality of his stupid loser players who just want a game that doesn't feel like bullshit ... come on. So much respect was just lost for that man. Never meet your heroes, nor listen to them talk about how much smarter they are than everyone else.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Just from reading the article you can see how bad it is, and it makes sense that it would be worse for larger playlists. They've completely discounted the fact that when you play large playlists, you don't listen to the whole thing. The problem with the dithering comparison is that in dithering, you're looking at the whole image at the same time. But nobody listens to a long playlist all at once. First of all, the co…
I think you're onto something here. Spotify already saves various metadata about the musical qualities of songs like how "upbeat" it is or how much it "slaps". I'm imagining some kind of K-farthest-neighbors algorithm could make it so that you're constantly being given songs that are as different as possible from the recent ones you've listened to. I dunno, I'm not very well versed in algorithms yet, maybe that would be way too slow.
Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)
#60Earlier 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…
I've noticed this too! It's especially bad after using discover weekly and liking a song or two, the shuffle then gets stuck on similar songs. It seems disabling "automix" in the settings returns the shuffle to be more like a traditional random shuffle.