Related papers: Card-cyclic-to-random shuffling with relabeling
Swish is a card game in which players are given cards having symbols (hoops and balls), and find a valid superposition of cards, called a "swish." Dailly, Lafourcade, and Marcadet (FUN 2024) studied a generalized version of Swish and showed…
Type A affine shuffles are compared with riffle shuffles followed by a cut. Although these probability measures on the symmetric group S_n are different, they both satisfy a convolution property. Strong evidence is given that when the…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
We study the topdrop map, a mapping on permutations in $S_n$ related to card shuffling. We show this map is bijective and study its orbit structure. We introduce the notion of the topdrop-necklace as a way of classifying the orbits of the…
We consider various probabilistic games with piles for one player or two players. In each round of the game, a player randomly chooses to add $a$ or $b$ chips to his pile under the condition that $a$ and $b$ are not necessarily positive. If…
A chain is an ordering of the integers 1 to n such that adjacent pairs have sums of a particular form, such as squares, cubes, triangular numbers, pentagonal numbers, or Fibonacci numbers. For example 4 1 2 3 5 form a Fibonacci chain while…
Ripple Effect is a logic puzzle where the player has to fill numbers into empty cells in a rectangular grid. The grid is divided into rooms, and each room must contain consecutive integers starting from 1 to its size. Also, if two cells in…
A common format for sports contests involves pairwise matches between two teams, with the #1 player of team A matched against the #1 player of team B, the #2 player of team A against the #2 player of team B, and so on. This paper addresses…
We study poker hand rankings in the partially generalised setting of a deck with $r$ ranks, rather than the typical 13 ranks. We provide the hand rankings for all $r$ and observe some interesting phenomena such as the smallest $r$ such that…
A cyclic order may be thought of informally as a way to seat people around a table, perhaps for a game of chance or for dinner. Given a set of agents such as $\{A,B,C\}$, we can formalize this by defining a cyclic order as a permutation or…
Combination locks are widely used to secure bicycles. We consider a combination lock consisting of adjacent rotating dials with the first nonnegative integers printed on each of them. Assuming that we know the correct combination and we…
Let $S$ be a connected graph which contains an induced path of $n-1$ vertices, where $n$ is the order of $S.$ We consider a puzzle on $S$. A configuration of the puzzle is simply an $n$-dimensional column vector over $\{0, 1\}$ with…
Consider a game of permutation wordle in which a player attempts to guess a secret permutation of length $n$ in as few guesses as possible. In each round, the guessing player is told which indices of their guessed permutation are correct.…
This paper studies biased riffle shuffles, first defined by Diaconis, Fill, and Pitman. These shuffles generalize the well-studied Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds shuffle and convolve nicely. An upper bound is given for the time for these shuffles to…
The Stirling number of the second kind $n\brace k$ counts the number of ways to partition a set of $n$ labeled balls into $k$ non-empty unlabeled cells. As an extension of this, we consider $b_1+b_2+\ldots+b_n$ balls with $b_1$ balls…
The *somewhere-to-below shuffles* are the elements \[ t_{\ell} := \operatorname{cyc}_{\ell}+\operatorname{cyc}_{\ell,\ell+1}+\operatorname{cyc}_{\ell,\ell+1,\ell+2}+\cdots+\operatorname{cyc}_{\ell,\ell+1,\ldots,n} \] (for $\ell \in…
While many dynamical systems of mechanical origin, in particular billiards, are strongly chaotic -- enjoy exponential mixing, the rates of mixing in many other models are slow (algebraic, or polynomial). The dynamics in the latter are…
We use a hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm to simulate the shaking of spheres at different vibrational amplitudes, and find that spontaneous crystallisation occurs in specific dynamical regimes. Several crystallising transitions are typically…
The game of Nim, which has been well known for many years, has numerous variations. One such variation is Circular Nim, where piles of stones are arranged on a circumference, and players take stones from consecutive adjacent piles in one…
The 21 card trick is well known. It was recently shown in an episode of the popular YouTube channel Numberphile. In that trick, the audience is asked to remember a card, and through a series of steps, the magician is able to find the card.…