The birthday paradox derives from how the chance of somebody there having their birthday on a specific day is 1-in-365 (ish)/nr-of-people hence the chance of two people having their birthday on that specific day is 1-in-365^2/nr-of-people, but the chance of two people having their birthday in the same day out of any days of the year is quite different because it’s not a specific day anymore so it’s quite a different calculation (which I totally forgot ;)).
In here the closest to that paradox would the chance of 2 whistleblowers of any company with whistleblowers dying within a few weeks of each other (which, depending on how many companies have whistleblowers, can be quite high) compared to the chance of 2 whistleblowers of Boeing dying within a few weeks of each other (which is statistically a lot lower unless there are thousands of Boeing whistleblowers).
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Not really. That is just a fact that there’s only 12 months, and the more samples you make increases the odds it’s a sample that overlaps with another.
What the OP is saying is that sometimes randomness can appear less random than other randomness. True randomness will occasionally give results that closely match something non-random. It’s why almost all music players don’t use true random for shuffle. True random you could have the same song play 15 times in a row. In fact, that is expected to happen eventually (assuming infinite time) just as all other sets of 15 songs are.
TheTetrapod@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My dream is for Spotify (and other music playing apps) to let you customize your shuffle algorithm. Minimum number of songs between repeating an artist or album, that sort of thing.
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 6 months ago
That would be sick. 🤘
dandroid@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
I made a random character selector app for super smash bros that makes you play through every character before it lets you repeat a character. And it won’t let two people play the same character at the same time. My friends and I like playing random characters, but we kept getting the same characters over and over again, sometimes even in the same colors (online only). I got frustrated one day and made the app.
It definitely livens up our game nights.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Yeah, true random sucks pretty badly for any sort of repeated selection. You could make your algorithm potentially even better by grouping characters into different roles and not repeating them in a row either. Never give two sword characters in a row if possible, for example.
dandroid@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
That’s a really interesting thought. We do still have issues where we get like Ken then Terry (or Mii Gunner then Mii Brawler) back to back, and for people who don’t like that type of characters, its a bummer.
Each character having a list of groups that they belong to, then not allowing players to play a character in the same group consecutively would probably be a huge improvement. I would need to be careful to make sure too many characters aren’t excluded, though. It would be tough to get right, but I think it would be really good.
Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
Didn’t the iPod have the same “issue” that it sometimes played the same song twice in a row or randomly played the next song in the playlist?
You essentially did what Apple did and made the randomness less random so humans think it’s more random.