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How random is xkcd? (2015)

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Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#121

Post by uxp8u61q »

Karellen wrote: post #100
uxp8u61q wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Do you re-shuffle after the deck is exhausted, or after every hand? It's not excessively unusual to be dealt the same card twice in two consecutive hands.

Who said anything about hands? I'm trying to make an analogy between shuffling a deck and shuffling xkcd comics. I thought having a visual, physical analogue would perhaps help in seeing that randomness still exists in a shuffle.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#122

Post by drdeca »

lostlogin wrote: post #113
hgomersall wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be biased and still random.

Can you explain that?

A non-uniform probability distribution is still a probability distribution, and, as long as it doesn’t assign probability 1 to any particular outcome, is still “random”.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#123

Post by bmeow_engineer »

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.

This happens a lot in game development too. Many games have "random" elements that end up with lots of duplicates as the developer uses a typical random number generator. I've found in games I worked on to make it "feel" random you have to tweak the algorithm to reduce duplicates and make things more evenly distributed.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#124

Post by Karellen »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #121
Karellen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you re-shuffle after the deck is exhausted, or after every hand? It's not excessively unusual to be dealt the same card twice in two consecutive hands.

Who said anything about hands? I'm trying to make an analogy between shuffling a deck and shuffling xkcd comics. I thought having a visual, physical analogue would perhaps help in seeing that randomness still exists in a shuffle.

Sorry, the point I was trying to make was "shuffle" could possibly mean "re-shuffle after every track" - so you could still get the same track twice in a row.

(It was a bad way of stating it, that's on me)

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#125

Post by uxp8u61q »

Karellen wrote: post #124
uxp8u61q wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about hands? I'm trying to make an analogy between shuffling a deck and shuffling xkcd comics. I thought having a visual, physical analogue would perhaps help in seeing that randomness still exists in a shuffle.

Sorry, the point I was trying to make was "shuffle" could possibly mean "re-shuffle after every track" - so you could still get the same track twice in a row. (It was a bad way of stating it, that's on me)

Shuffling the whole playlist to choose a new song every time is no different than choosing uniformly from all songs every time. What would be the point? I can't tell what you are getting at.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#126

Post by seanhunter »

Feels like there are two things going on:

1. Randomness is inherently counterintuitive and humans in general really struggle to comprehend its ramifications. Read “Fooled by Randomness” or a million other things about this.

2. When a lot of people see something which offers a random sample they expect a random shuffle. In particular if you’re making any kind of playlist thing and you have a feature which does random samples not random shuffles people will hate your feature and you’ll feel superior because you’ll think they are wrong but actually you are the one who is wrong. You need to build a shuffle of some kind. Changing your sampling strategy to be “less random” thinking that it will coincide with peoples’ intuitions is making it even more wrong than before.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#127

Post by xtagon »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #119
xtagon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a set of songs or albums {a, b, c} Suppose shuffling results in ordered set [b, a, c] Suppose user plays through the entire set. Now it's shuffled again before repating. Suppose the new shuffle results in ordered set [c, a, b] The user now hears c play after c

I'm going to ignore the other ways to handle that and just point out that that is multiple shuffles and won't be a problem if the user initiates all shuffles.

If the user has to initiate all shuffles, it won't play continuously. If you handle it another way, that demonstrates that it doesn't "just" work with a pure shuffle without using those tricks.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#128

Post by Dylan16807 »

xtagon wrote: post #127
Dylan16807 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to ignore the other ways to handle that and just point out that that is multiple shuffles and won't be a problem if the user initiates all shuffles.

If the user has to initiate all shuffles, it won't play continuously. If you handle it another way, that demonstrates that it doesn't "just" work with a pure shuffle without using those tricks.

1. Without a clearer spec, we should not assume the user wants any repeats at all.

2. Your claim is not even true as written.

3. I'm tempted to assume the user has a reasonable amount of music, so it will last as long as necessary. And you can't force me not to assume that.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#129

Post by yungporko »

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…

yep spotify has always had this issue which is why it blows my mind that anybody uses it at all. it just takes a very small handful of the songs in a playlist and then shuffles those endlessly, which makes the entire service useless as far as i'm concerned. it's actually just kind of sad, it just isn't a difficult problem to solve, i'm 100% certain one of their junior devs could fix it in an afternoon.

i switched to apple music because of this, which does work properly (unless youre using the web client, in which case you can't click the shuffle button because it only queues up the songs from the first lazy-loaded "page", so you have to scroll all the way to the bottom, play a song from the last "page", then put it into shuffle mode)

youtube music is probably the best option for music streaming if you can stand to give them your money.

Re: How random is xkcd? (2015)

#130

Post by Karellen »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #125
Karellen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, the point I was trying to make was "shuffle" could possibly mean "re-shuffle after every track" - so you could still get the same track twice in a row. (It was a bad way of stating it, that's on me)

Shuffling the whole playlist to choose a new song every time is no different than choosing uniformly from all songs every time. What would be the point? I can't tell what you are getting at.

My point is that, for a not-unreasonable interpretation of "shuffle", it is the same as "random".

nvm

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