Related papers: Shuffled equi-n-squares

At some places (see the references) Martin Erickson describes a certain game: "Two players alternately write O's (first player) and X's (second player) in the unoccupied cells of an n x n grid. The first player (if any) to occupy four cells…

Mechanical shufflers used in many casinos employ a card shuffling scheme called \emph{shelf shuffling}. In a single-shelf shuffling, cards arrive sequentially, and each incoming card is independently placed on the top or the bottom of a…

The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…

A curious number is a palindromic number whose base ten representation has the form $a \ldots a b \ldots b a \ldots a$. In this paper, we determine all curious numbers that are perfect squares. Our proof involves reducing the search for…

This paper discusses the permutations that are generated by rotating $k \times k$ blocks of squares in a union of overlapping $k \times (k+1)$ rectangles. It is found that the single-rotation parity constraints effectively determine the…

We study a family of shuffling operators on the symmetric group $S_n$, which includes the top-to-random shuffle. The general shuffling scheme consists of removing one card at a time from the deck (according to some probability distribution)…

We study 4-by-4 squares formed by cards from the EvenQuads deck. EvenQuads is a card game with 64 cards where cards have 3 attributes with 4 values in each attribute. A quad is four cards with all attributes the same, all different, or half…

Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…

Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we continue the study of a prequel paper on the pile shuffle and its capabilities as a sorting device. We study two sort feasibility problems of…

A latin square of order $n$ is an $n\times n$ array of $n$ symbols in which each symbol occurs exactly once in each row and column. A transversal of such a square is a set of $n$ entries such that no two entries share the same row, column…

A structure $\mathcal{A}=\left(A;E_i\right)_{i\in n}$ where each $E_i$ is an equivalence relation on $A$ is called an $n$-grid if any two equivalence classes coming from distinct $E_i$'s intersect in a finite set. A function $\chi: A \to n$…

Li et al. in [Inf. Process. Lett. 77 (2001) 35--41] proposed the shuffle cube $SQ_{n}$ as an attractive interconnection network topology for massive parallel and distributed systems. By far, symmetric properties of the shuffle cube remains…

Linear regression with shuffled labels and with a noisy latent design matrix arises in many correspondence recovery problems. We propose a total least-squares approach to the problem of estimating the underlying true permutation and provide…

A square matrix of order $n$ with $n\geq 2$ is called a \textit{permutative matrix} or permutative when all its rows (up to the first one) are permutations of precisely its first row. In this paper, the spectra of a class of permutative…

A pile-scramble shuffle is one of the most effective shuffles in card-based cryptography. Indeed, many card-based protocols are constructed from pile-scramble shuffles. This article aims to study the power of pile-scramble shuffles. In…

Consider a permutation $\sigma\in S_n$ as a deck of cards numbered from 1 to $n$ and laid out in a row, where $\sigma_j$ denotes the number of the card that is in the $j$-th position from the left.\rm\ We study some probabilistic and…

We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…

The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…

A Latin square $L(n,k)$ is a square of order $n$ with its entries colored with $k$ colors so that all the entries in a row or column have different colors. Let $d(L(n,k))$ be the minimal number of colored entries of an $n \times n$ square…

We continue the study of Adin, Alon and Roichman [arXiv:2502.14398, 2025] on the number of steps required to sort $n$ labelled points on a circle by transpositions. Imagine that the vertices of a cycle of length $n$ are labelled by the…