When people say they want to "randomly shuffle a playlist", they really don't want that. They want the perception of randomness, but _true_ random doesn't abide by rules.
If you're actually random, there is a probability that it might just play all the songs straight through. Or just pick songs by a single artist back-to-back.
> ..at least once a week, a developer would come to my office, and say "the random number generator is broken, we need to look at it."--It's because they hit a streak. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhC0NaB6ock&t=2343s
He shares more details about game design choices in the video.
- X-Com 2 lies in favor of the playing when displaying a chance of hitting of 85% [ https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/jake-solomon-explains-t... ]
- Baldur's Gate 3 "Karmic Dice" will prevent streaks of very high or lows rolls
- Tetris games doesn't use Math.random for piece distribution. Most modern Tetris (like Tetris Effect) uses Fischer-Yates with 7 pieces (in the community we call 7-bag) or 14 pieces (it avoids repetition "at the seam" of a bag). The Tetris game I like the most (Tetris the Grand Master) uses a history system (the chance of receiving a recently distributed piece is heavily reduced; it's less predictable than 7-bag). IIRC even classic NES Tetris has a repetition avoidance system.
This had consequences on competitive play; they wouldn't even tell you how exactly the algorithm worked, so the only way to build a deck was lots and lots of simulations.
Cheaters, like in any game, tend to look for methods that maximize the combination of impact and plausible deniability. Marked sleeves, sleight of hand (pun very much intended) etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20872110 - Sep 2019 (41 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37107346 - Aug 2023 (16 comments)
Then you are not lying to the users, and your tooltips/docs etc. are correct as well.
Sadly youtube just picks the next one based on the current ones ID + some seed, so it constantly gets stuck in loops
As another neat trick, they have added a small animation while seeking to next track with some lower time bound, so it looked like thinking for a second or so. In reality, the decision was instant, seeking was not.
Actually not sure if it's even that far fetched. Making the logged-out-experience worse on purpose is something all the big internet firms do.
There could be advanced implementations (like with the remembered passwords, where YT would store a list of seeded hashes of your viewed videos). But they are that: advanced implementations, that impose an extra cost.
Though I still think "not remembering watch history" (and adjusting what you are shown based on that) to mean that a functionality that doesn't have anything to do with tracking (because it only requires information from your current session) to be a little lazy.
You wouldn't expect a slide-show of images to be shown in random order, just because you didn't consent to the cookie banner.
But in all fairness - I really like youtube's auto-play and suggestion algorithm when it comes to music. I use it for free and I haven't seen an ad in years so I don't want to complain :)
I even went so far to seek out a website that does it for me, and which I set up as a bookmark https://youtube-playlist-randomizer.bitbucket.io/
Altough, seems like the site is now broken
I used to get it all the time and haven't experienced it since switching to an account where it's enabled. I guess it may have just been a coincidence.
It had a toggle for random play. It indeed apparently played the tracks at random.
By random I mean random, not shuffle. It would play the same track multiple times during a listening session. For example tracks in order like 2, 2, 7, 8, 7, ...
I actually liked that.
If memory serves, it would stop playing after it had played each track at least once. If there were a lot of tracks it would not finish, at least not before the batteries ran out.
Same in games. "I had an 80% chance to hit and didn't" is a perfect example.
Say you're playing through someone's electronic D&D module and you try to do something with a 90% chance of success. Then you roll a 2. You didn't make a mistake when deciding what to do, so that feels wrong -- this is a problem with randomness.
What do you do? You reload from right before you tried to do the thing, and you reroll. The game can't actually make you accept randomness if you don't want to. So they have to do something else.
There is a probability that entropy will decrease, it's just small enough to neglect. Playing songs straight through isn't really a concern.