Randomization on home page not very random?

[skaven]

I've been using Subsonic for about 6 months now and I have noticed that the web interface does not seem to be very "random".

One of the features that I really like is that when you click the "home" link, 10 random albums are selected. I use Subsonic while I work and I like using that feature to help me pick out the next album to listen to.

But I notice that the same 10-20 albums (out of several hundred in my library) seem to show up a disproportionate amount of times.

The reason I'm posting this under "feature requests" is that I think it would be a useful feature to augment the randomization algorithm with a selection affinity counter. Each time an album is shown on the home page for random selection, it has its count incremented. The random-selection algorithm can then prefer to select albums with the lowest selection count, thus ensuring consistent random coverage even on architectures that might have poor random-number generation capabilities.

[achoo5000]

I bet it is random and you just noticed the same album a few times. Doing any sort of counting and favoring albums that have been shown less often is demonstrably not random.

A truly random algorithm should not depend at all on the history of albums displayed. If you flip a coin and get heads 6 times in a row, at that point, what's the probability that you will get heads again? It's still 50/50.

It might be what you're looking for, but it's not random.

EDIT: don't worry, it's not your fault, humans are just bad at seeing randomness.

[skaven]

Hmm.... then perhaps I'm actually experiencing a bug of some kind. Because I know for a fact that there are albums that I added months ago to the library (and they show up when I explicitly go look for them) but they've *never* shown up in the "home" random list. And yet there are albums that I *know* have appeared time after time.

So perhaps it is random, and as luck would have it, some of the albums aren't showing up. But that just doesn't seem statistically likely given how many times I refer to the "home" screen every day (20+) versus how many albums are in the library (a few hundred) and how many days these new albums have been in the library (at least 90). But I'm not a statistician, so I wouldn't know how to crunch those numbers anyway.