English

Generalised shuffle groups

Group Theory 2019-08-15 v1

Abstract

The mathematics of shuffling a deck of 2n2n cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling knkn cards by cutting into kk piles with nn cards in each pile and using k!k! shuffles. A conjecture of Medvedoff and Morrison suggests that all possible permutations of the deck of cards are achieved, so long as k4k\neq 4 and nn is not a power of kk. We confirm this conjecture for three doubly infinite families of integers: all (k,n)(k,n) with k>nk>n; all (k,n){(e,f)2,e>4,f \mboxnotamultipleof e}(k, n)\in \{ (\ell^e, \ell^f )\mid \ell \geqslant 2, \ell^e>4, f \ \mbox{not a multiple of}\ e\}; and all (k,n)(k,n) with k=2e4k=2^e\geqslant 4 and nn not a power of 22. We open up a more general study of shuffle groups, which admit an arbitrary subgroup of shuffles.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.05128,
  title  = {Generalised shuffle groups},
  author = {Carmen Amarra and Luke Morgan and Cheryl E. Praeger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.05128},
  year   = {2019}
}