English

Shuffling cards by spatial motion

Probability 2021-06-14 v3

Abstract

We propose a model of card shuffling where a pack of cards, spread as points on a square table, are repeatedly gathered locally at random spots and then spread towards a random direction. A shuffling of the cards is then obtained by arranging the cards by their increasing xx-coordinate values. When there are mm cards on the table we show that this random ordering gets mixed in time O(logm)O\left(\log m\right). Explicit constants are evaluated in a diffusion limit when the position of mm cards evolves as an interesting 2m2m-dimensional non-reversible reflected jump diffusion in time. Our main technique involves the use of multidimensional Skorokhod maps for double reflections in [0,1]2[0,1]^2 in taking the discrete to continuous limit. The limiting computations are then based on the planar Brownian motion and properties of Bessel processes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1708.08147,
  title  = {Shuffling cards by spatial motion},
  author = {Persi Diaconis and Soumik Pal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.08147},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

27 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:24:43.418Z