Guessing cards with complete feedback
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 cards comprised of distinct types each of which appears exactly 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 of correct predictions a player can make: one could always guess the exact same type of card which shows that one can achieve . We prove that the optimal (non-psychic) strategy is just slightly better than that and find the first order correction when grows at suitable rates. This is very different from the case where is fixed and is large (He & Ottolini) and similar to the case of fixed and is large (Graham & Diaconis). The case answers a question of Diaconis.
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}
}