Unrandomness
Apr. 22nd, 2015 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI usually have music playing while I'm on the computer. Generally, I let Windows Media Player grab a random eight hours of songs from my library and play them. Recently, though, I've noticed something odd: I seem to be hearing certain songs way more often than I ought to.
A typical eight-hour playlist contains about 138 songs. There are about 4200 songs on my computer. On average, assuming truly random selection, the number of songs on both of two lists should be around 138 * 138 / 4200 - 4 or 5 songs, typically. But I'm getting overlaps that are much larger than that, very frequently.
What I'm guessing is this. The "random selection" button actually reads "Play favorites". WMP's idea of "favorites" has to be based on which songs I play more often - but I've never deliberately set up a list of songs I particularly like. So, all it has to go on is its own set of pseudo-random selections; if a song has been randomly selected a couple of times, its chance of being randomly selected next time goes up. In other words, WMP has decided that a certain random selection of my songs is actually a selection of my favorite songs....
It's like a musical version of the Founder Effect.
I'll have to think about what, if anything, I want to do about this. It's likely to require quite a bit of effort.
A typical eight-hour playlist contains about 138 songs. There are about 4200 songs on my computer. On average, assuming truly random selection, the number of songs on both of two lists should be around 138 * 138 / 4200 - 4 or 5 songs, typically. But I'm getting overlaps that are much larger than that, very frequently.
What I'm guessing is this. The "random selection" button actually reads "Play favorites". WMP's idea of "favorites" has to be based on which songs I play more often - but I've never deliberately set up a list of songs I particularly like. So, all it has to go on is its own set of pseudo-random selections; if a song has been randomly selected a couple of times, its chance of being randomly selected next time goes up. In other words, WMP has decided that a certain random selection of my songs is actually a selection of my favorite songs....
It's like a musical version of the Founder Effect.
I'll have to think about what, if anything, I want to do about this. It's likely to require quite a bit of effort.
