randomness

schon häufiger über die shuffle funktion in winamp gewundert, wenn zu häufig die gleichen bands dran kommen? das konzept zufall ist nicht immer leicht zu verstehen aber das ist uns seit statistik ja schon länger klar.

The problem, it turns out, isn't that the programs aren't randomizing my playlists. They are. According to Jeff Lait, a mathematician and author of randomm3u, it's what's happening between my ears, specifically, in my expectations of what it means for something to be random.

To illustrate his point, Lait referred to a phenomenon statisticians call the birthday paradox. Roughly stated, it holds that if there are 23 randomly selected people in a room, there is a better than 50-50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. The point: Mathematical randomness often contradicts our intuitive expectations of randomness.