hmm... i really like this genius playlist experiment. here are the questions that i immediately thought of whilst reading your post:

• is the genius algorithm purely deterministic? i.e. if i start with the same version of itunes and the same copy of the master drive, will i get the same playlist as you? how long will it take them to diverge? well, i guess probably really fast. the question is, then, what is the rate of divergence? but since we don't have a divergence quantifier, that'd be hard to measure.


• is it better for the playlist if the genius is really smart or sort of stupid? pandora is supposed to be wicked smart because all of the data behind the songs is generated by actual humans (who know about music) listening to and 'tagging' the tracks. i find, though, that it plays a) the same fucking songs all the time and b) the songs on your 'radio station' sound like the songs on any radio station -- similar in 'genre' or current popular appeal, rather than being artist/era agnostic and actually sounding the same. i'm guessing this is why martin thought he could get stuck in a loop.


• i really need to sync with the master drive.

also, and i'm not making excuses here, while traffic on this site has slowed, there's pretty good volume on mikex0r's japan blog. we don't have rights to post, but most of the fort is represented in the comments.