{"id":132,"date":"2006-10-07T13:20:04","date_gmt":"2006-10-07T13:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=132"},"modified":"2006-10-07T13:20:04","modified_gmt":"2006-10-07T13:20:04","slug":"ipod-shuffle-and-randomness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"iPod Shuffle and Randomness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/weekend\/story\/0,,1888124,00.html\" target=\"_blank\">Oh no, not Steely Dan again<\/a> published in todays&#8217; Guardian colour magazine, Steven Levy explains, in layman&#8217;s terms, why the iPod&#8217;s shuffle produces seemingly non-random results (so Steely Dan appears to be played more than other artists on his iPod) yet Apple&#8217;s engineers reassure him that the code does produce randomness.<\/p>\n<p>The article has a lovely quote: <\/p>\n<ul><i>&#8220;Our brains aren&#8217;t wired to understand randomness &#8211; there&#8217;s even a huge industry that takes advantage of people&#8217;s inability to deal with random distributions. It&#8217;s called gambling.&#8221;<\/i><\/ul>\n<p>The way Apple dealt with this apparent non-randomness is fascinating.<\/p>\n<p>The article quotes Brian Hansen&#8217;s experiments which you will find at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.omninerd.com\/2005\/08\/25\/articles\/34\" target=\"_blank\">How Much Does iTunes Like My Five-Star Songs?<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Back in the 1970s the Open University&#8217;s first level course M100 discussed the problem of defining randomness. It was usually defined in terms of probability which was itself defined in terms of randomness but it didn&#8217;t discuss Claude Shannon&#8217;s important contribution mentioned in the article. You can read more about randomness at <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Randomness\" target=\"_blank\">Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This article (an edited extract from a forthcoming book about the iPod <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.co.uk\/catalog\/book.htm?command=Search&#038;db=main.txt&#038;eqisbndata=0091910099\" target=\"_blank\">The Perfect Thing<\/a>) should be required reading for everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an article Oh no, not Steely Dan again published in todays&#8217; Guardian colour magazine, Steven Levy explains, in layman&#8217;s terms, why the iPod&#8217;s shuffle produces seemingly non-random results (so Steely Dan appears to be played more than other artists on his iPod) yet Apple&#8217;s engineers reassure him that the code does produce randomness. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sixthform.info\/maths\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}