 I remember back in 2005 Steve Jobs from Apple was giving a keynote address and he was introducing a new feature to iTunes called Smart Shuffle. Next is Smart Shuffle. You know we've gotten a lot of people that say our shuffle is not random. Well it really is random. But sometimes random means you've got two songs from the same artist next to each other. It just happens randomly sometimes. So what we've added is Smart Shuffle to actually make it less random if you want. Even though people will think it's more random, it's actually less random. And what it is, in preferences, there it is right there, it says Smart Shuffle allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs by the same artist or from the same album in a row. So you can leave it on random or you can say I want it to be more likely that I hear the songs from the same artist in a row or less likely. You can tweak it however you want and have it come out just like you'd like. Now think about what's going on here. When people are listening to music on their iPod they hear three or four songs in a row by the same artist and so they think the random function is broken. People actually wrote letters to Apple saying hey your random function is not random. And in response, Apple made their random function less random so we would perceive the non-randomness as random. That's right. I love that example but this idea of randomness is really old. In fact it goes back I think 65 years when people started looking at how people perceive patterns and noise. And as you said people tend to think that chance randomness is a lot less lumpy than it actually is. And there's a really nice way to demonstrate this. What you can do is take a person, put them in a room and ask them to flip a coin. So their job is to sit there, flip a coin, heads write it down, flip it again, tails write it down and keep doing this 100 times. So after those 100 coin flips you have a sequence of heads and tails. You can then take another person and put them in the same situation but this time take the coin away. And so their job is to flip an imaginary coin and write down whether it's heads or tails. And so they also do this 100 times so they just think to themselves heads write it down, tails write it down and so on. Now if you take those two sequences those two random sequences of 100 coin flips and put them side by side you can almost instantly see which one was generated by an actual coin and which one was imaginary, which one was generated by a human. Now the reason is that the one generated by a human our own perception of how random things ought to be is not random at all. In fact there's way too many, what's called, alternations. So people think that it should go heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails and so on. Maybe they'll throw in an odd double run, heads, heads, maybe a triple if they get adventurous but it's very rare for them to throw in four, five of these in a row because it just seems like it's very non-random. Because if you look at the actual sequence runs of four and five are actually way more common than what people think. Now I think the reason is to be fair I think the reason is that people don't have much experience with truly random sequences or things that generate random sequences and so what they often think is that okay well a coin coming out heads or tails that's 50-50 whatever that means 50-50 so it's two possibilities one out of two is 50% and so you would expect that in the short run it should come out heads just as often as it is tails and that's kind of true but in fact what happens is something called the law of averages the law of large numbers and that happens in the long run but not in the short run necessarily and so if you flip the coin a thousand times or a hundred times even in the long run yeah it'll come close to about 50-50 literally or 500 and 500 if it's a thousand flips but not in the short run in the short run it's really quite lumpy you can have as I said runs of five or even six in a row in the short run and so people misinterpret what's happening in the long run for what ought to be happening in the short run and yeah it's really quite common and it happens way more often than we think not just with coin flips but in other areas as well yeah this this miss misinterpretation of random events is related to something called the gambler's fallacy now if I'm flipping a coin and I get six heads in a row and I ask people to bet what the next outcome of the next flip is going to be people are far more likely to say it's tails right yeah yeah we're due for a tells because we've had six in a row right but think about how that could possibly work what would be going on there the coin doesn't have a memory there's no there's no micro trip in the coin that remembers the outcomes of before and what's more there's no the coin has no conscience so it can't say oh yeah we've had we've had you know six heads in a row we should we should probably add a tails now each one of these flips is independent we're starting with a clean slate every time so getting a heads is just as likely as getting a tails and we see this in all sorts of areas one is with the roulette wheel at the casino so picking red or black and the last casino I went to they were even nice enough to put a digital display above the roulette wheel showing all the previous outcomes so if you saw that there'd been lots of blacks in a row you could make an informed decision and and bet on red this there's a good example of this from way back in 1913 at the Monty Monte Carlo casino where there was some cuffle all of a sudden and then people were running to this particular table where 16 blacks had come up in a row and people were feverishly trying to put ahead a red bet down because we were due for one right what happened 17 black 18 black 19 black 20 black again it went up to 26 blacks in a row and the casino made millions of dollars just on that those those few minutes right so it happens with lottery winners as well they'll they'll pick numbers that have not come up for a while people at slot machines if it hasn't paid off for a few hours of them playing they'll guard it they'll they'll shut it down so nobody else can play it now this it's intuitive it's it's common but it's false and this is why they call it the gambler's fellacy