Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?(quantamagazine.org) |
Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?(quantamagazine.org) |
I'd like more details on how this was accomplished on a practical level. Got me thinking about how to embed trackers thin enough to go into a playing card that would operate like a mesh network then the deck could self report once it's properly randomized making a green light go off indicating play may begin.
You would need sloppy ones to introduce randomness.
>The riffle shuffle has to follow a realistic but strict model where cards are randomly interleaved from the left or right pile one by one. (Each card gets dropped from either the left or the right pile with a probability that’s proportional to the number of cards remaining in that pile. This means that the cards don’t simply alternate between left and right, which would result in a predictable structure; instead, the order might go “left, right, right, left, right, left, left.”)
This talks about seven consecutive riffle shuffles ("cut the deck and interleave the piles"): Those are not a "perfect shuffle" (i.e. same probability for every permutation) by themselves, only after doing them several times consecutively (which is kinda suprising by itself).
How random is that deck? How many “cold spots” does it have? Just how not random of decks are people playing with, and ultimately does that even matter if players lack the knowledge or skill to change their play because of that knowledge?
... Why would it be proportional to the number of cards in each pile? (Edit: I suppose the person doing the shuffling might adjust the rate of cards coming from each hand ... But not perfectly and continuously)
Isn’t that where the randomness comes in?