Related papers: The 21 Card Trick and its Generalization
The game of SET is one of the best mathematical games ever. It is no wonder that people have tried to generalize it. We discuss existing generalizations of the game of SET to different groups. We concentrate on two types of generalization:…
The technique of guessing can be very fruitful when dealing with sequences which arise in practice. This holds true especially when guessing is performed algorithmically and efficiently. One highly useful tool for this purpose is the…
By a well-known result of Bayer and Diaconis, the maximum entropy model of the common riffle shuffle implies that the number of riffle shuffles necessary to mix a standard deck of 52 cards is either 7 or 11--with the former number applying…
We introduce a generalization of "Solo Chess", a single-player variant of the game that can be played on chess.com. The standard version of the game is played on a regular 8 x 8 chessboard by a single player, with only white pieces, using…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
Strategy card game is a well-known genre that is demanding on the intelligent game-play and can be an ideal test-bench for AI. Previous work combines an end-to-end policy function and an optimistic smooth fictitious play, which shows…
In this article, we present a trick around Fibonacci numbers which can be found in several magic books. It consists in computing quickly the sum of the successive terms of a Fibonacci-like sequence. We give explanations and extensions of…
Historically, games of all kinds have often been the subject of study in scientific works of Computer Science, including the field of machine learning. By using machine learning techniques and applying them to a game with defined rules or a…
We present a novel proof that the maximum number of sets with 4 properties for 12 cards is 14 using the geometry of the finite field F_3^4, number theory, combinatorics, and graph theory. We also present several computer algorithms for…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
The game of war is one of the most popular international children's card games. In the beginning of the game, the pack is split into two parts, then on each move the players reveal their top cards. The player having the highest card…
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?…
Poker is one of the most popular card games, whose rational investigation represents also one of the major challenges in several scientific areas, spanning from information theory and artificial intelligence to game theory and statistical…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…
Card-based cryptography uses physical playing cards to construct protocols for secure multi-party computation. Existing card-based protocols employ various types of shuffles, some of which are easy to implement in practice while others are…
Magic: the Gathering is a popular and famously complicated card game about magical combat. Recently, several authors including Chatterjee and Ibsen-Jensen (2016) and Churchill, Biderman, and Herrick (2019) have investigated the…
The game show Lucky 13 differs from other television game shows in that contestants are required to place a bet on their own knowledge of trivia by selecting a range that contains the number of questions that they answered correctly. We…
The ``overlapping-cycles shuffle'' mixes a deck of $n$ cards by moving either the $n$th card or the $(n-k)$th card to the top of the deck, with probability half each. We determine the spectral gap for the location of a single card, which,…
This paper considers the effect of riffle shuffling on decks of cards, allowing for some cards to be indistinguishable from other cards. The dual problem of dealing a game with hands, such as bridge or poker, is also considered. The…
A popular challenge on the social media app TikTok is to place the output of a random number generator in ascending order without arriving at a contradiction. Most players rely on intuition to construct their sequences and debate has…