Now Checking:
5tucAaWmzSIjv2l7FeciEG https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5tucAaWmzSIjv2l7FeciEGRegenerating in
to find a Spotify playlist with exactly 100 songs.
A link to a Spotify playlist can look like this:
The bold part at the end of the URL is a
Spotify ID, an identifier made up of 22 characters that can be used to reference any
resource on Spotify such as an artist, album, track, playlist,
etc.[1]
However, the ID alone won't tell you what kind of resource it
references. In this scenario we only know it refers to a playlist
due to the preceding
playlist/ in the URL.
With that established - this site will generate a random 22 character combination every 5 minutes and attach it to the end of that URL with the aim of finding a playlist containing exactly 100 songs.
You might now be thinking okay so what are the chances of that actually happening?
Well, the identifier is a 22 byte string of base62 ASCII text which can contain lowercase letters a-z, uppercase letters A-Z, and numbers 0-9. This offers a possible 6222 combinations - which results in a number with 39 zeros:
2,707,803,647,802,660,400,290,261,537,185,326,956,544
2.7 duodecillion, 39 zeros
or
Two duodecillion seven hundred seven undecillion eight hundred three
decillion six hundred forty-seven nonillion eight hundred two
octillion six hundred sixty septillion four hundred sextillion two
hundred ninety quintillion two hundred sixty-one quadrillion five
hundred thirty-seven trillion one hundred eighty-five billion three
hundred twenty-six million nine hundred fifty-six thousand five
hundred forty-four
aka plenty
Spotify hosts over 4 billion public playlists on their platform.[2] That's still 30 zeros to contend against and almost one and a half nonillionths of a chance per attempt to find any playlist, nevermind the amount of songs in it.
0.00000000000000000000000000000148%
1.48 nonillionths, 30 zeros
At this point, I can't produce an exact figure for how many of these 4 billion public playlists contain exactly 100 songs. Instead, I've estimated based on a playlist dataset released by Spotify back in 2018. [3] [4]
The Million Playlist
Dataset: a dataset of 1 million playlists consisting of over 2
million unique tracks by nearly 300,000 artists. This represents the
largest public dataset of music playlists in the world.
By using some pretty advanced data science techniques on this dataset
$
grep
'"num_tracks": 100,'
./data/*.json |
wc
-l
seriously, 33gb of json for that
it turns out that there are 4,467 playlists containing 100 songs, which rounds nicely to 0.45%.
Scaling this up to the 4 billion available playlists makes for a potential 18,000,000 playlists with exactly 100 songs, which sounds like a lot until you factor in the two duodecillion Spotify ID combinations going on. Finally, this gives us just under one nonillionth of a chance per attempt to find a playlist with exactly 100 songs.
0.000000000000000000000000000000665%
0.665 nonillionths, 30 zeros
It's also worth noting that previous combinations could be generated again in the future because the size of existing playlists can change and new ones are created all the time.
If a random combination results in a playlist with any amount of songs then it will still be displayed on this page because that would be a miracle on it's own.
The use of the word lottery here might be a bit too generous, this is far far less likely to happen than winning the lottery. Humans often struggle to grasp the true scale of extremely large numbers and astronomical probabilities, this timeline attempts to put these numbers into perspective against winning the lottery.
High odds from the get-go but the lowest in this list - actually winning the EuroMillions Lottery.
139,000,000/1
139 million to 1, 8 zeros
The single-elimination basketball tournament consists of 68 teams competing through 7 rounds. Nobody on record has ever predicted a perfect bracket, the odds of achieving it at random are already a huge step up from the lottery.
9,223,372,036,854,775,808/1
9.2 quintillion to 1, 18 zeros
Roy C. Sullivan of Virginia, USA is recognised by Guinness World Records as the person struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being. [8]
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000/1
10 octillion to 1, 28 zeros
I gave this a few attempts in the name of science but my highest record was 5 heads in a row so yeah these odds seem about right. 1/2100
1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376/1
1.2 nonillion to 1, 30 zeros
Although this number may look similar to the one above, the difference of 0.3 nonillion is comparable to the number of stars in the observable universe[9] multiplied by a million.
It's not exactly looking good for this experiment.
1,503,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000/1
1.5 nonillion to 1, 30 zeros
The possible permutations of a deck of cards is 52 factorial, this means that a randomly shuffled deck will have an order of cards that has very likely never been seen before and will never be seen again.
80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000/1
80 unvigintillion, 67 zeros
Still, you never know. Right?