[sjmm1989]

Which to a machine may as well be the same thing in either phrasing. You want something different from what you just listened to. To it, anything not 'that song' is different and 'new' potentially if also not 'just listened to' within a certain set amount of songs. Even without that certain set of songs being logged and considered; any picking of a different song from the last is verifiably random.

Think of it all like a deck of cards. Shuffle is apt in that sense. You don't expect to see double aces each time you pick through the shuffled deck of cards, but sometimes you do. Sometimes, you also find double jacks, queens and kings; in a row. Sometimes you don't. That deck could be shuffled by the worlds best trick shufflers. Still gonna get doubles now and then.

True Randomness is not really technically possible. At least, not with our current technologies available; and we have a lot of aces up our sleeves.

The best we can manage for randomness right now, is creating random strings of numbers to serve as the seed for new randomness. At least, if I understand correctly. If I do, then this is why cryptography is so damn important for us in the computational side of things. Network Security requires randomness.

[tomsmeding]

If I understand you correctly, I think you missed my point. You're explaining how with true randomness, you get different stuff most of the time and the same stuff some of the time. That is true. But it's not what people want when they press shuffle. What people want is something _different_, and giving the same song twice is not something different. As another commenter wrote, giving multiple (different) songs after each other from the same album would even be undesirable, even if that could occur perfectly well with random shuffling.

A human pressing "shuffle" usually doesn't want randomness. They want pleasing _variation_. See e.g. the "Comparison" heading here: https://blog.demofox.org/2017/10/20/generating-blue-noise-sa...

[Out_of_Characte]

This is true for many games as well, their "1%" chance usually means you'll always get lucky twice in a series of 200 attempts

[avgcorrection]

You would expect a shuffled deck of 52 unique cards. Not a deck of three 5 of spades. Likewise with a playlist: if I shuffle a playlist of 52 songs, I want those 52 songs to be played in a random order. Not for a random song to be played each time but a random shuffle of that list.