Related papers: Card shuffling and diophantine approximation

The Thorp shuffle is defined as follows. Cut the deck into two equal piles. Drop the first card from the left pile or the right pile according to the outcome of a fair coin flip; then drop from the other pile. Continue this way until both…

Recently Wilson [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 274--325] introduced an important new technique for lower bounding the mixing time of a Markov chain. In this paper we extend Wilson's technique to find lower bounds of the correct order for…

We study the cutoff phenomenon for generalized riffle shuffles where, at each step, the deck of cards is cut into a random number of packs of multinomial sizes which are then riffled together.

In this expository article, we highlight the direct connection between card shuffling and the functions known as $P$-partitions that come from algebraic combinatorics. While many (but not all) of the results we discuss are known, we give a…

Standard perfect shuffles involve splitting a deck of $2n$ cards into two stacks and interlacing the cards from the stacks. There are two ways that this interlacing can be done, commonly referred to as an in shuffle and an out shuffle,…

The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…

We analyze the mixing time of a popular shuffling machine known as the shelf shuffler. It is a modified version of a $2m$-handed riffle shuffle ($m=10$ in casinos) in which a deck of $n$ cards is split multinomially into $2m$ piles, the…

In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…

We consider the following card guessing game with no feedback. An ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards. One after…

For irrational $\alpha$, $\{n\alpha\}$ is uniformly distributed mod 1 in the Weyl sense, and the asymptotic behavior of its discrepancy is completely known. In contrast, very few precise results exist for the discrepancy of subsequences…

We consider a family of card shuffles of $n$ cards in which the allowed moves involve transpositions corresponding to the Jucys--Murphy elements of the symmetric group $\{S_m\}_{m \leq n}$. We determine the eigenvalues of the corresponding…

Frequently, randomly organized data is needed to avoid an anomalous operation of other algorithms and computational processes. An analogy is that a deck of cards is ordered within the pack, but before a game of poker or solitaire the deck…

Analogues of 1-shuffle elements for complex reflection groups of type $G(m,1,n)$ are introduced. A geometric interpretation for $G(m,1,n)$ in terms of rotational permutations of polygonal cards is given. We compute the eigenvalues, and…

The well-known Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles assumes that the cards are initially cut 'about in half' and then riffled together. We analyze a natural variant where the initial cut is biased. Extending results of Fulman…

We study deformations of the Plancherel measure of the symmetric group by lifting them to the symmetric group and using combinatorics of card shuffling. The existing methods for analyzing deformations of Plancherel measure are not obviously…

In this paper, we investigate the mixing time of the adjacent transposition shuffle for a deck of $N$ cards. We prove that around time $N^2\log N/(2\pi^2)$, the total variation distance to equilibrium of the deck distribution drops abruptly…

We introduce a new type of card shuffle called one-sided transpositions. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric…

Spectral clustering is discussed from many perspectives, by extending it to rectangular arrays and discrepancy minimization too. Near optimal clusters are obtained with singular value decomposition and with the weighted $k$-means algorithm.…

Divide a deck of $kn$ cards into $k$ equal piles and place them from left to right. The standard shuffle $\sigma$ is performed by picking up the top cards one by one from left to right and repeating until all cards have been picked up. For…

In the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds shuffle, a deck of $N$ cards is cut into two approximately equal parts which are then riffled uniformly at random. Bayer and Diaconis famously showed that this Markov chain undergoes cutoff in total variation…