I think we are not the only ones surprised with the ipod random play mode.
When the three or more songs from the same artis are played sequentially its impossible not asking if we are truely in a random mode.
What actually happens is that Humans are not a very good random generator. If we try to generate a random sequence of for example 1s and 0s and compare it with the sequence generated by a computer we will notice that in our sequence there are fewer long sequences of 1s an 0s.
The same happens with the ipod songs. The graph below shows a random generated play list with excel random generator. Y axis contains the artist and X axis the order. It is shown that there are a lot of agrupations of songs from the same artist playing together.
So the Ipod probabilly doesn’t make any complex algorithm taking into account the user preferences or anything like that.
