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Comment by crb | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs in 2005: "You know we've gotten a lot of people that say our shuffle's not random. Well it really is random but sometimes random means you've got two songs from the same artist next to each other. Just happens randomly sometimes.

And so what we've added is smart shuffle to actually make it less random - if you want.

Even though people will think it's more random it's actually less random and what it is, in preferences, there it is right there, it says smart shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs by the same artist or from the same album in a row."

https://youtu.be/lg188Ebas9E?t=719

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I always got the feeling that the original iPod Shuffle would randomize your songs ONCE, and that's why people where complaining. So when you loaded up your Shuffle, the software would order the songs randomly, on a playlist, for that set of songs. The Shuffle would then reshuffle the songs, when new one where added or removed, but only then.

That theory also explained the disconnect between the complaints and Apples response. Apple would indeed be right that the music was randomized, but not continuously, as consumers expected.

It was never clear to me what the issue actually was, perhaps we really don't understand randomness.

Apple's response above was talking about iTunes, not about iPods.

If I remember correctly, the encryption performed by the Enigma machine was cracked largely because they would never repeat the same character twice in a 3 letter key. The Allies discovered this and it was a big help in their code breaking efforts.

My point being, even mathematicians might mistakenly believe that repeating a song or artist is less random. The creators of the Enigma machine were not dumb, but they believed that repeating letters would be more predictable and thus less random.

I thought the weakness was that a character was never replaced by itself? Eg. HH (for Heil Hitler) could never be replaced with HH, no matter what the seed.

Your right, I think I was wrong. They made a few similar mistakes, but what I described might be wrong.

They did not allow a digit in the key to repeat in the same position 2 days in a row, I just reread. If the key was "123" yesterday, it could not be "145" today, because the first position was unchanged.

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