English

Card Guessing with Partial Feedback

Probability 2023-06-22 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

Consider the following experiment: a deck with mm copies of nn different card types is randomly shuffled, and a guesser attempts to guess the cards sequentially as they are drawn. Each time a guess is made, some amount of "feedback" is given. For example, one could tell the guesser the true identity of the card they just guessed (the complete feedback model) or they could be told nothing at all (the no feedback model). In this paper we explore a partial feedback model, where upon guessing a card, the guesser is only told whether or not their guess was correct. We show in this setting that, uniformly in nn, at most m+O(m3/4logm)m+O(m^{3/4}\log m) cards can be guessed correctly in expectation. This resolves a question of Diaconis and Graham from 1981, where even the m=2m=2 case was open.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.05059,
  title  = {Card Guessing with Partial Feedback},
  author = {Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham and Xiaoyu He and Sam Spiro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.05059},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

24 pages; minor errors corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:14:22.406Z