English

Guessing cards with complete feedback

Probability 2022-11-17 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

We consider the following game that has been used as a way of testing claims of extrasensory perception (ESP). One is given a deck of mnmn cards comprised of nn distinct types each of which appears exactly mm times: this deck is shuffled and then cards are discarded from the deck one at a time from top to bottom. At each step, a player (whose psychic powers are being tested) tries to guess the type of the card currently on top, which is then revealed to the player before being discarded. We study the expected number Sn,mS_{n,m} of correct predictions a player can make: one could always guess the exact same type of card which shows that one can achieve Sn,m>mS_{n,m}>m. We prove that the optimal (non-psychic) strategy is just slightly better than that and find the first order correction when n,mn, m grows at suitable rates. This is very different from the case where mm is fixed and nn is large (He & Ottolini) and similar to the case of fixed nn and mm is large (Graham & Diaconis). The case m=nm=n answers a question of Diaconis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.09094,
  title  = {Guessing cards with complete feedback},
  author = {Andrea Ottolini and Stefan Steinerberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.09094},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T06:03:51.472Z