Our brains aren’t wired to understand randomness

I’ve read a couple of very interesting articles about randomness and iPods that have put a doubt in my mind about the whole notion of the shuffle function and its “shuffle”-ness.

Here’s one. The following is an excerpt from the famous article on Newsweek

Just about everyone who has an iPod has wondered how random the iPod shuffle function really is. From the day I loaded up my first Pod, it was as if the little devil liked to play favorites. It had a particular fondness for Steely Dan, whose songs always seemed to pop up two or three times in the first hour of play. Other songs seemed to be exiled to a forgotten corner of the disk drive. Months after I bought “Wild Thing” from the iTunes store, I’m still waiting for my iPod to cue it up.

More specifically, when an iPod does a shuffle, it reorders the songs much the way a Vegas dealer shuffles a deck of cards, then plays them back in the new order. So if you keep listening for the week or so it takes to complete the list, you will hear everything, just once. But people generally listen only to the first few dozen songs. In theory, that sample should be evenly distributed among all the artists and albums in their collections. So why do you typically get three Wilco songs in an hour while Aretha Franklin waits in the wings forever?

I explained this phenomenon to Temple University prof John Allen Paulos, an expert in applying mathematical theory to everyday life. His conclusion: it’s entirely possible that nothing at all is amiss with the shuffle function. It’s quite common for random processes (like coin tosses) to get unlikely results here and there, like runs of six heads in a row. Over a very long time, it evens out, but it’s hard for us to envision that. “We often interpret and impose patterns on random processes,” he says, adding that this might be expected in the case of music, which evokes strong emotions. Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, puts it another way: “Our brains aren’t wired to understand randomness.”

Movie release dates – Art or science or both?

For the audience, the release dates of movies couldn’t be more trivial. It seems there is no strategy required for releasing movies, just pick the first day after the movie is “completely complete”. What I mean by completely complete is a time when all your marketing campaigns have picked up by all the television channels, when all celebrities have made their appearances on the evening talk shows, and if you’re lucky, some kind of controversy may have surrounded your movie’s release. Of course, we can’t forget the fact that a holiday season is the most important factor in gauging a movie’s success. Most of the movies “slated to be a hit” that wound up either in summer or winter season end up being a hit.

Well, after reading this article, I’ve realised that it’s not that simple. There is a game that goes on between different producers, studios and media. There is a sense of “sensibleness” among the various media houses and a continual game of who blinks first, or who’s the chicken is played between them.

The unspoken pact is that no two similar movies should get released on one date, because otherwise the profits are split between the two, and both ending up with little to cheer about. And hence there is always a race to pick a release date for one’s movie and ensure no one else is releasing a similar movie, on the same day.

E.g December 2002 featured one of the most dramatic games of chicken in recent memory, when two films starring Leonardo DiCaprio were both slated to open on Christmas weekend. Ultimately, Miramax blinked first, moving the release of Martin Scorsese’s ”Gangs of New York” five days earlier and ceding the holiday to the other DiCaprio film, DreamWorks’ ”Catch Me if You Can.” ”We didn’t think about moving,” says Terry Press, the head of marketing for DreamWorks. ”We had been there first, and ‘Catch Me if You Can’ was perfect for that date.” This year, DreamWorks chose to schedule a somber psychological drama, ”House of Sand and Fog,” for the day after Christmas, deferring a bit to Miramax. ”I don’t want our reviews to run on the same day as ‘Cold Mountain,”’ Press says.

And sometimes when studios do have to move a film’s release, the size does matter. Bigger the star-cast, the budget and marketing matter, more effort is required to move the release dates. However, the party to move its date (or the chicken) doesn’t always loses, on occasions, a studio may see that test audiences are going berserk for a film and move it into a more competitive time period. Universal initially had only modest expectations for the 1999 teenage sex comedy ”American Pie,” but when the test screenings did so well, it pushed the film from the spring — historically something of a dumping ground — into the summer, where it became a smash hit and established a franchise. ”We did the same thing with ‘The Fast and the Furious,”’ says Nikki Rocco, Universal’s head of distribution.

Of course you don’t want to just keep playing with the release dates, which might irk the audience and media, and they could end up dumping the movie altogether. And sometimes when a movie release schedule is postponed to give space to a bigger more obvious hit, the producers of the movie whose schedule has been changed wish that the bigger movie gets a great start and that more and more people flock in the first weeks to watch it, because the people watch it in the first few weeks, the lesser will watch it later, when the postponed movie is released.

But at the end, it all comes down to this – ” ”There is never a bad time to release a good film — and there is never a good time to release a bad film.”

Vamsi Krishna Duvvuri

MBA Class of 2009

Goizueta Business School

Prisoner’s Dilemma explained Eric Cartman’s way

Now, before I get started here, I hope everybody knows Eric Cartman, and may be, some of you might have seen this Southpark episode. In reality, it might not be the most apt way of explaning prisoner’s dilemma, but it sure is a fun way of knowing more about it.

So, what am I talking about? Lets see, first let us define PD: A situation where two or more players are involved in a deal (or a understanding of co-operation), each player has an incentive to defect (or betray his or her partner(s)) after which the other players may select a move which would then result in competition between those players.

The classic example through which PD is explained most easily is as follows:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (“defects”) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation.

In Southpark’s episode 99 (S7E3), the gang is punished by their art teacher for messing around in the art class, and so the kids plan to get back at the teacher by TPing her house. After “decorating” the house that night, Kyle has nightmares about the incident, the art teacher’s house and her crying children, and he can’t sleep anymore.

TP-ed house

Cartman, as the genius he is, comes up with a “perfect alibi”: Last night, all four of us were at the bowling alley until about 7:30, at which time we noticed Ally Sheedy, the Goth chick from The Breakfast Club, was bowling in the lane next to us, and we asked her for her autograph, but she didn’t have a pen, so we followed her out to her car, but on the way we were accosted by five scientologists who wanted to give us all personality tests, which were administered at the Scientology Center in Denver until 10:45, at which time we accidentally boarded the wrong bus home and ended up in Rancho de Fritos Rojos, south of Castle Rock, and finally got a ride home with a man who was missing his left index finger, named Gary Bushwell, arriving home at 11:46.” However, when the counseler calls each of them to the room individually (to see if one or more could mix the story and ride out the others for a better deal), they get nervous and try to tell the exact same story. It seems at the end of that meeting, they manage to stick to story.

Cartman telling the alibi story (Click to listen to the story)

Kyle’s guilt gets better of him, but Cartman senses the situation and plans to kill Kyle. However, since Stan and Kenny refuse to help him, he takes Kyle in a boat-ride to Stark’s pond and tries to kill him by hitting him with a wifflebat, and fails to do so, obviously. So, Kyle, Stan and Kenny go to Officer Barbrady, who has arrested Butters as the prime suspect, for the confession. However, after seeing butters in Jail, Cartman tries to ensure the confession from his friends is never deliver. Stan requests Cartman to confess as well, but Cartman refuses to do so…

The next day  Stan, Kyle and Kenny rush into the Principal’s office, only to find out that Cartman confessed earlier in a bid to secure a better deal for himself. Each of the boys ends up with two weeks’ detention, except for Cartman, who gets only one for “being brave”.

Another example – Dilbert’s Dilemma

Vamsi Krishna Duvvuri

MBA Class of 2009

Goizueta Business School