I Tunes Shuffle...is it cleverer than you think?

[big screen satellite]

i listen to music while i work from home, all day long, and i have i-tunes on shuffle for most of the day...and its sometimes very strange in its 'random' track selection...

i have over 6900 tracks on my machine at the moment and oddly today its just selected:

Futureshock - the Question (which is a remix of Underworld's Why Why Why)

then followed it up immediately

Underworld - Why Why Why (the long version)

its just like it thought, i'll select something similar to before, Matt won't mind, i'll do the thinking for him...very odd - i thought - hence my post...

i do have a lot of Underworld tracks on here, but the odds of this happening must be pretty long...

i wonder what's next...Why Why Why - by the Woodentops?

it keeps me happy with its randomness...unless my computer is now actually thinking... a la Skynet, in Terminator 2?

[big screen satellite]

scrap that - my computer is stupid...for some reason it followed this up with Castles in the Sky - Ian Van Dahl...just when i thought it was getting a brain...

Unless anyone of you can tenaciously link Why Why Why by Underworld to Ian Van Dahl...??

[sanakan]

you might like this recent slashdot-article which links to this analysis on the shuffle function of itunes.
i don't know if it's any good, but at least it's related

[big screen satellite]

very intersting, as dull as that seem be to some people, i find it very interesting (especially as i work in statitical type analysis..., and produce these kind of comparisson charts all day long) i just wouldn't have the time or inclination to analyse I-Tunes to that degree...

and as random as I-Tunes is, he is right in his asertion that you will likely see patterns, (if you want to) in anything

a professor talking on the radio the other week (when Liverpool won the European cup - and the co-incidental links to previous cup wins) suggested that it woulkd be more strange that co-incidences didn't occur in life than if they did,

on an unrelated note: apparently a room of 11 random people is all you need to get two people with the same birthday!!!

anyway, Random I-Tunes is still running and i have no ratings on my tracks, so its purely random, as far as i can tell...but i'll report back any anomolies....

[sanakan]

sorry, further off topic

Originally Posted by big screen satellite

very intersting, as dull as that seem be to some people, i find it very interesting (especially as i work in statitical type analysis..., and produce these kind of comparisson charts all day long)

aahh... i spent last week trying to make sense of things as chi^2 - tests, maximum-likihood functions, and so on... and - i don't like it

Originally Posted by big screen satellite

on an unrelated note: apparently a room of 11 random people is all you need to get two people with the same birthday!!!

i think it's 23 people to raise the possibility to 0.5

[Raz]

Shuffle in iTunes is bollocks. I remember ranting about it in #rtsr a while ago

[sola sistim]

Originally Posted by Raz

Shuffle in iTunes is bollocks. I remember ranting about it in #rtsr a while ago

the Shuffle on iPod Shuffle's is worse.

[groovypanda]

Originally Posted by big screen satellite

Unless anyone of you can tenaciously link Why Why Why by Underworld to Ian Van Dahl...??

why why why would you have that turgid piece of pop-trance on your ipod in the first place...

[Drix]

Originally Posted by big screen satellite

and as random as I-Tunes is, he is right in his asertion that you will likely see patterns, (if you want to) in anything

Made me think of the movie Pi.. God I loved that film.
Made me want to learn more math, and that is just plain sick comming from me.. I actually started at a math intro course and did pretty well for about half a year. It's all lost now though.

But I've been thinking about the shuffle function as well. In WinAmp you can set a degree of how random you want it, but I think it selects worse and worse music the less random you make it, so I always keep mine at max. In fear of what it might play if I try the minimun, I have never tried it..

[stimpee]

Matt: Why Why Why do you have Castles in the Sky by Ian Van Dahl on your ipod? its utter _____