Guessing about Guessing: Practical Strategies for Card Guessing with Feedback
Probability
2021-07-20 v2 Combinatorics
Abstract
In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g. correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where suits do not matter) the optimal strategy differs from the "greedy strategy" (of guessing a most likely card each round). Further, both optimal and greedy strategies are far too complicated for real time use by human players. Our main results show that simple heuristics perform close to optimal.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2012.04019,
title = {Guessing about Guessing: Practical Strategies for Card Guessing with Feedback},
author = {Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham and Sam Spiro},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.04019},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
20 pages, minor typos corrected, to appear in the American Mathematical Monthly excluding Section 6