Related papers: Shuffling cards by spatial motion

In a recent work Conger and Howald derived asymptotic formulas for the randomness, after shuffling, of decks with repeating cards or all-distinct decks dealt into hands. In the latter case the deck does not need to be fully randomized: the…

We show that for any semi-random transposition shuffle on $n$ cards, the mixing time of any given $k$ cards is at most $n\log k$, provided $k=o((n/\log n)^{1/2})$. In the case of the top-to-random transposition shuffle we show that there is…

Juggling patterns can be described by a sequence of cards which keep track of the relative order of the balls at each step. This interpretation has many algebraic and combinatorial properties, with connections to Stirling numbers, Dyck…

When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…

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…

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…

Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…

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.

We introduce and analyze the $S_k$ shuffle on $N$ cards, a natural generalization of the celebrated random adjacent transposition shuffle. In the $S_k$ shuffle, we choose uniformly at random a block of $k$ consecutive cards, and shuffle…

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…

The random transposition shuffle on repeated cards induces a Markov chain on the quotient space of arrangements with multiplicities, and is equivalent to the many-urn mean-field Bernoulli-Laplace model introduced by Scarabotti. Writing…

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…

We consider a card guessing strategy for a stack of cards with two different types of cards, say $m_1$ cards of type red (heart or diamond) and $m_2$ cards of type black (clubs or spades). Given a deck of $M=m_1+m_2$ cards, we propose a…

In this paper, we study the biased random transposition shuffle, a natural generalization of the classical random transposition shuffle studied by Diaconis and Shahshahani. We diagonalize the transition matrix of the shuffle and use these…

This paper is about the following question: How many riffle shuffles mix a deck of card for games such as blackjack and bridge? An object that comes up in answering this question is the descent polynomial associated with pairs of decks,…

We prove a theorem that reduces bounding the mixing time of a card shuffle to verifying a condition that involves only triplets of cards. Then we use it to analyze a classic model of card shuffling. In 1988, Diaconis introduced the…

Recently, Diaconis, Ram and I created Markov chains out of the coproduct-then-product operator on combinatorial Hopf algebras. These chains model the breaking and recombining of combinatorial objects. Our motivating example was the…

A deck of $n$ cards are shuffled by repeatedly taking off the top card, flipping it with probability $1/2$, and inserting it back into the deck at a random position. This process can be considered as a Markov chain on the group $B_n$ of…

Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…

We introduce discrete time Markov chains that preserve uniform measures on boxed plane partitions. Elementary Markov steps change the size of the box from (a x b x c) to ((a-1) x (b+1) x c) or ((a+1) x (b-1) x c). Algorithmic realization of…