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Sal Rahman

Spotify's shuffle algorithm feels more random, even if the shuffling does not yield a truly randomized ordering of songs.

They did this because their original algorithm that truly randomized the order of the songs didn't quite feel random to listeners, and this was due to two songs from the same artist playing back-to-back, giving the illusion that the playlist has not truly shuffled. It just does not feel random to them.

Article: "Scrambling Eggs for Spotify with Knuth's Fibonacci Hashing"

pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/fibona

We noticed some users complaining about our shuffling algorithm playing a few songs from the same artist right after each other. The users were asking “Why isn’t your shuffling random?”. We responded “Hey! Our shuffling is random!
At first we didn’t understand what the users were trying to tell us by saying that the shuffling is not random, but then we read the comments more carefully and noticed that some people don’t want the same artist playing two or three times within a short time period.
If you just heard a song from a particular artist, that doesn’t mean that the next song will be more likely from a different artist in a perfectly random order. However, the old saying says that the user is always right, so we decided to look into ways of changing our shuffling algorithm so that the users are happier. We learned that they don’t like perfect randomness.
#Programming#Coding#Algorithms
Dec 09, 2023, 05:58 PM·Public·Web
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Pia Herself :verifiedlesbian:

@manlycoffee I have come across the exact same thing.

A client talked to us about a problem: their employees had agreed to random drawing of who gets popular holidays as days off and who gets the less desired dates.

Too many to draw from a hat, so a script was made to allocate the holidays. We ran the thing numerous times to verify it was behaving as expected.

One year later the employees got super angry, the program was obviously biased. I pulled the logs and saw no foul play. It was just that a person that the majority didn't like had gotten the good dates twice in a row so obviously it was flawed.

People start seeing patterns in randomness on their own quite fast, it gets worse when there's already suspicion about the thing being rigged. Apparently there's also no way out once people have decided the system is rigged.

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