Steven Levy really liked Steely Dan, but so too, it seemed, did his iPod. Like a lot of people, he began to wonder about its shuffle - was the random function really random or a result of dirty tricks, blunders... or even telepathy?Read more about it at the Guardian (HT: The Mathematics Weblog)
Saturday, October 07, 2006
"We're making it less random to make it feel more random."
Maybe we should use the iPod to explain all concepts in theoretical computer science:
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Ipod users discover Kolmogorov Complexity. When a user says random, he just doesn't mean "with uniform probability" but actually means "with no discernible pattern", i.e. Kolmogorov random.
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