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GAMBLERS_SHUFFLE

                                             May 13, 2023


An insight from an old lightning talk
I gave a few times on "Esthetic Randomness":

   Programmers obsess about how good their random number
   generation is, with applications like cryptography in mind,
   but if you're talking about doing a "random" pick of
   for esthetic purposes, that's a different application.

   Human beings have a very poor intuitive understanding
   of probability, which is what keeps the lights on in Reno
   and Los Vegas, and that means if you give someone a truly
   mathematically random distribution something will
   seem off about it.

   I used to play xgammon, and I found I kept having the
   weird, paranoid feeling that the programmer had rigged
   the dice.  "Doubles three times in a row, *again*?! What?"

   When you're doing a "random" selection of something
   to show to a human being, you need to fake a
   universe in which the "Gambler's Fallacy" is
   correct.  You need dice that have a memory, where
   "streaks" are more unlikely than they would be.

   When you're doing a shuffle play of music, you'd
   rather not have a lot of adjacent picks from the
   same band.

   Further, you need to treat end points as special:
   the first and last item need to be handled differently.

   For some applications you might want to weight them
   to seem "ordinary".

   If the first card out of the deck is the Ace of Spades,
   they're going to wonder if you rigged the draw.

   In a sixties classics shuffle, the first pick probably
   shouldn't be Tiny Tim's "Tiptoe Through the Tulips".

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