Is Shuffle Random? Why You Wouldn't Want It to Be
添加时间：2020-11-09 20:07:56 浏览：2237
Whether you use Apple Music or Spotify's streaming service, you're likely familiar with the shuffle option.
Many people enjoy using shuffle, getting random songs to play at different times (random being the key word here).
But in truth, what we think of as a random shuffling of songs isn't actually what we're getting.
A few years earlier, many people suspected they had received defective iPods. When they heard the same artist twice in a row, they concluded that their randomly generated music simply couldn't be random.
"It really is random," Steve Jobs said during a 2005 keynote. "But sometimes random means you've got two songs from the same artist next to each other."
Actually, there is an explanation for why we think in this way. "People see patterns where there are none," Amos Tversky, a cognitive psychologist said, "and they invent causes to explain them in order to make better sense of the world."
Apple's solution to this funny problem was to make it less random.
Steve Jobs was once onstage talking about randomness.
"What we've added is Smart Shuffle to actually make it less random" he said.
"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."
It simply took different songs by the same artist and distributed them more or less evenly across the playlist.
If you had a playlist of Beyoncé, The Beatles, and Drake, for example, you would never have the burden of hearing three consecutive songs by Drake.
As he heard himself explaining how it worked, Steve Jobs couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of what he was saying.
"Even though people will think it's more random," he said, "it's actually less random."