![]() Perfectly random means that the following two orders are equally likely to occur (different colours represent different artists). Randomness creates counter-intuitively large clusters, such as a run of five heads in 30 flips of a coin, which leads to unexpected results. Our brains are implementing an order, a 'coin memory', whereas in fact true randomness has no memory of what came before. This is because after two or three heads our brains tend to think, 'OK, time for a tails now.' When someone is imagining coin flips, however, they almost never imagine a run of five straight heads or tails. In a list of 30 coin flips you're reasonably likely to get a run of five. If one of the lists has a run of five heads or tails in a row, you can be pretty sure that's the real coin. There are different ways to tell the fake and real randomness apart, but the most obvious is to look for runs of straight heads, or straight tails. You can tell the difference because humans are very, very bad at faking randomness. The second is a human attempting to be random. The 'wow' moment comes when you're presented with the two lists of heads and tails and it's usually instantly obvious which is which. They do this in secret, so you don't know who has flipped the real coin and who has flipped the imaginary one. The other will imagine flipping a coin 30 times and also write the sequence of results. Ask one to flip a coin 30 times and write down the sequence of heads and tails. 'The problem is that, to humans, truly random does not feel random,' said Mattias Johansson, a Spotify software engineer, in a response on the question-and-answer site Quora. 'If you just heard a song from a particular artist, that doesn't mean that the next song will be more likely from a different artist in a perfectly random order,' says Spotify on its blog. This phenomenon is called Gambler's fallacy and it's the same fallacy that lead to the mistake about playlists not being random. It is also programmed to expect something to happen if it hasn't occurred in a while.įor instance, people often think that if they haven't won anything in a scratch card lottery a couple of times in a row, they should have bigger chance of winning the next time. The human brain is designed to notice coincidences. Spotify's algorithm – which is anything but random – uses the length of a playlist and records how many of each type of song it contains Spotify realised that our brains actually want to see what we consider 'random' – or different genres of music spread evenly over a playlist.
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